"When someone doesn't show up, the people who wait sometimes tell stories about what might have happened and come to half believe the desertion, the abduction, the accident. Worry is a way to pretend that you have knowledge or control over what you don't--and it surprises me, even in myself, how much we prefer ugly scenarios to the pure unknown. Perhaps fantasy is what you fill up maps with rather than saying that they too contain the unknown."
— Rebecca Solnit (A Field Guide to Getting Lost)
Double-Click To Go There
For my site-specific project I have a series of photographs of my grandmother’s childhood home taken from an image I discovered on GoogleMaps. (This is probably a violation of copy write laws.)
What I did was conceptually simple. I took a picture of her house on my computer screen, uploaded that image on to a computer, then photographed that image from the monitor, and uploaded that image on to the computer and repeated the process several times.
I was interested in the effect of camera lens on monitor, in the distortion that occurs in an image when these two media meet; how in the process of viewing, capturing, then reviewing and re-capturing the image changes- morphs from a nostalgic sunny day into a sort of digital nightmare.
For me, the pattern that emerges almost reads like a finger-print, evoking the idea of a crime scene investigation, like looking for clues somewhere after the fact. Also it reminds me of the patterns you find in wood that indicate that tree's age, or the ripples that occur when one body of water enters anohter.
Key Themes: Memory, Ownership, Longing, Nostalgia, Copy Write
