DOCUMENTING EXPERIENCE

This series explores the tangibility of memory and the physicality of experience. The receipt can often act as a synthetic, or accidental journal entry, a recording of time and place. How can we interact with memory, time, and place through residual materials? Through this series I attempt to evoke a sense of place in the viewer and myself, to allow the pure form of certification, to act, potentially, as a lived experience and to begin to question the emotional purity of an experience versus the historical artifact.

Using the camera as means of authentication, to give legitimacy to the experience through a recounting of the article. An interpretation of a happening, recorded with location and time, much to a calendaring effect. All of the necessary information to describe the event is present, though there is still a disconnect from the emotionality, why? Can a document become a stand-in for experience? Is the indexical document, or as Kant would like to call it, the object of experience enough to give resonance to a memory, or perhaps to create an imagined experience based on the information visually suspended? Only to exist as such an object when the subject recognizes it as such. What happens when the tangible document is replaced with an image of the article? What if the image is confronted with the artifact itself? Does the image then lose part of its materiality or validity?