Ephemory

This work was first inspired by literature, specifically memoir. I was curious as to what the affordances of modern tools were in the artistic exploration of timeless existential inquiries: how can one show the story of a ‘self’? If memories are, to an extent, what the ‘self’ is made of, how can one physicalize that which exists merely in one’s own mind? Alongside these first few questions came another: as memories are fleeting, are the objects we hold onto artifacts of the experiences we have had—and, as an extension—of who we are? Here is where I simply as “a room for sleeping in”, became inspired by the bedroom. Defined conceptually a bedroom is much more: it is a habitat wherein individuality is allowed to flourish. The objects which we choose to keep in our “[rooms] for sleeping” maintain a certain intimacy. There is a connection between memories and sleeping, too: once a moment has passed, its memory is merely a dream that we have had while awake.

These ponderings led to the exploration of my own bedroom, through the objects which it contains. Beyond items I have collected for over twenty years, in this project I consider the things I have written over time to be objects. I have decided to show rather than tell my story through these bedroom objects: my private world. However, in this process, the illegibility of expressing the private world accurately and clearly to others made me think, too, about my own sense of the public world. 

I strive—in a near daily practice—to capture the moments that resonate with me; I find the. best method is by iPhone photography. In this meager attempt at solidifying my experiences of moving through the world, I have collected an archive of iPhone photos spanning about ten years. There are some gaps in these grasps at immortalizing a life lived: chunks of years missing due to lost phones without back up. Again, a certain illegibility persists.

I decided to marry these many themes: the bedroom objects that symbolize the memories of a private life—modernist in the way memories are adjacently and tangentially tied up to such seemingly banal objects—and the photography that exists as proof of a public life lived—haphazardly and spontaneously tied together through the medium of iPhone. Each of these parts embody a certain glitch— an inaccuracy and a falsehood—that is true to the nature of memory itself. In this sense, technology as an artistic medium beautifully conveys that which memories are: ephemeral, ever-evolving and surprisingly unreliable.