Riley Kim

I often treat my high school years as memories I want to bury and forget. Although that period was filled with conflict and difficulty, I realized that the people and moments that helped me endure it also shaped who I am now. For this project, which allowed us to use any medium that we wanted, I printed footage from my high school years frame by frame, then physically cut and tore apart the faces of friends and familiar backgrounds to reveal fragments of Mark Rothko’s paintings underneath. By manually printing, scanning, cutting, and damaging these images, I wanted to confront memories I had tried to avoid rather than preserve them romantically. Rothko’s large color fields evoke emotion without explanation–Rothko confirming the silence is accurate. For me, they awakened an unexpected sense of longing. In the film, a phone call about revisiting my old school transitions into a dream-like sequence where memory, guilt, nostalgia, and resentment become intertwined. After waking, I call my friend back, only to hesitate and say, “Never mind.” Through this work, I wanted to honestly capture my inability to fully move on or fully forgive my past, while still continuing to grow through that incompleteness.