2023 - acrylic on canvas - two 48” x 48” or 122 x 122 cm panels
TRAILING MEMORIES interrogates the fragility of memory as a stand-in for truth. It shows how easily both can be manipulated, altered, and obscured whether through time, trauma or artifice. It is, at its core, a visual reflection on alternative facts, erasure, and the quiet rewriting of history, both personal and collective.
The artist begins by pouring a line of white paint down the canvas's centre, then using a roller imprints a series of markings across a contrasting black background. That initial white line evokes truth and unaltered memory in its purest form. With each repetitive outward motion, the marks and patterns begin to recede, shift, and drift from their original forms. The artist then intervenes further, altering the white marks with black paint, subtly or at times beyond recognition. This second layer of manipulation radically shifts perception both literally and conceptually contradicting conventional thinking as the addition of black paint visually reads as subtraction. It stands in for the forces of distortion whether from the slow erosion of time, disruption from trauma, or the calculated intervention of those seeking to reshape a narrative to their own ends.
The resulting paintings recall the visual language of electrocardiograms, seismographs, or geological strata, registers of life's rhythms, the passage of time, and the marks left in their wake. But these are in fact incomplete altered trails tracing the vulnerability of truth and memory. TRAILING MEMORIES thus stands as a visual argument for truth's essential paradox, that memory, and by extension history, is never simply black and white.
2023 - acrylic on canvas - 60” x 48” - 152 x 122 cm
2023 - acrylic on canvas - 47” x 39” - 120 x 100 cm