Past, Present, With Future Projection

I come from a family of storytellers.  The stories that are told have become more exaggerated and further from any sort of truth with each passing year and yet somehow they have become a part of me. I found that as time passed my memories of the actual events have faded and been replaced with the stories themselves. I still have a strong need to hold onto my replacement memories, shaping them into a narrative sequence and creating for myself a sort of imagined self.

The self that exists in our narrative story is more like a character, whose different co-existing parts are bound together by close relation and imagined as one cohesive whole. Consciousness, by very definition, is in constant flux.  The self “I” is constantly slipping into the past and we cling onto what we feel is the enduring self. We are constantly reshaping and reconstructing this enduring self, which in actuality is an illusion.

            “Past Present with Future Projection” examines narrative identity and the self portrait as representations of the enduring self which does not exist.  Intellect is fragmented and our mental states are not best represented as a singular I, but as many non-communicating and conflicting pieces. This series of self portraits presents a self that is not contained by a singular trace of a body or representation. Instead, these photographs have been seamed together from numerous self portraits to create a singular portrait molded out of multiple selves.