This series of images is a set of considerations regarding what we see, what we represent, and the foibles of memory. In the prints, which include family Kodachrome slides and chromolithographic postcards, I have employed dots appropriated from Ishihara Pseudoisochromatic plates.
Ishihara plates are used by ophthalmologists to test color perception. While the test plates reveal physical perceptual deficits, these anomalies have a parallel to our forms of recall. We may feel that the images we make and collect authentically reflect our experience, or be true to our sense of memory, but they may very well be idiosyncratic, inaccurate, and incomplete.
In the past decade, many of the works I have produced have been drawn from a collection of inherited images and materials and focus on family history, biography, reminiscence, and recall. This series is inspired by my interest in recalling and reclaiming family history through imagery and my father’s practice as an ophthalmologist. His work was in service of sight, and my work involves seeing through images.
Making this work raises questions regarding our perception of the past and the manner in which memories are informed and constructed through imagery. How is our construction and perception of what we recall anomalous and to what extent are the resulting memories inherently colored, selective and obscured?