From the Memory Series, 2/10, 2014, Composite archival pigment print, Edition, 28 x 37 inches, Unframed print

From the collection of Denise Froehlich

“Victor Burgin, writing on photography, comments: “More than any other textual system, the photograph presents itself as ‘an offer you can’t refuse.’” This is so because the viewer is seldom asked or expected to be a critical reader of a photograph. Under a way of seeing things that can be described as realist, we are not, as readers, expected to ask how this reality, or this image, came to be. Or, to put it in slightly more theoretical terms, where the signifier is thought to be identical to a preexisting signified, there is hardly any interrogation of the process through which signification takes place. As John Tagg states, “In realism, the process of production of a signified through the action of a signifying chain is not seen. It is the product that is stressed, and production that is repressed.”

The works presented in the exhibition stem from the Memory Series, a process-based “photo-composite” print series that intends to meditate on structures, behaviors and nature of our biological imaging found in our memory and our dreams. In order to explore how visual image forms via experience, I have been for years now photographically documenting everyday objects in different times, locations and varying circumstances. The multiple recordings/documentation would ultimately be reduced to minimal opacity (practically made transparent) and were digitally all printed on top of each other by re-running single/same piece of paper through an inkjet printer each time the next image-sequence was being printed. The single piece of paper would go through an inkjet on average of some 40 times to create a “composite image” that is neither singularly photographic, nor hand generated, but formed from the process of layering minimal and individually abstract information of different views and time moment sequences of single subject matter. The final results are images with a prevailing sense of fleeting and vague dimensions, multi-view perspectives, and general loss of linear and/or photographic memory.