The Perfect Past
chromogenic prints, 2000, ranging in size from:
29.5" x 29 1/8" to 29.5" x 88 3/4"     

Throughout its history photography has been credited with its power to record, and with this established its basic characteristic as a mnemonic device.  But like the mind's memory process, we know this property is selective, subjective and fragmentary at best.  In this series of images, The Perfect Past, I have been interested in making visible the limitations of the memory process.  These images were undertaken out of a daily practice of shooting and randomly recording daily living. This is a way I had never worked with the camera before. 
           
Emerging from a dire sense of displacement, the daily practice of photographing became a way of confirming a sense of existence in the world, and of trying to make sense of my surroundings. When I began to make these images I had recently relocated to the town of my childhood, a place I had lived until I was six years old. This place existed only in fleeting memories, recollections from photographs and Super 8 home movies. Yet, in revisiting childhood places, nothing seemed familiar or comforting and this only served to further a sense of anxiety and dislocation.
           
Using the most basic means (a cheap plastic camera) became a way of trying to mimic visually what was happening experientially. Things were disjointed, out of control, and not idyllic or perfect at all, as I had once imagined them. The camera, which was badly made, randomly allowed light leaks and imprints of the film's frame numbers to occur. Through its clumsy construction, the camera created images by letting light through the lens, but also disrupting the same images by letting light into the camera. In the this way, the camera simultaneously recorded my experience and then randomly interrupted it. The camera's inability to consistently advance from one frame to the next created other forms—at times odd juxtapositions, at others a sense of cinematic narrative.  Although these markings are by happenstance, by choosing this camera, I purposely nurtured the possibility of imperfections in the image. These disruptions not only speak of the limitations of the memory process, but also admit the medium's vulnerability and process. 

The images selected for The Perfect Past were shot in movement, from vehicles or while walking, furthering the sense of living in a transitional state. At times the landscape images present strange juxtapositions.  Often children appear, their images marred by colourful flares of light. Images with a series of frames which run consecutively create a kind of narrative, mimicking many hours spent viewing Super 8 family films. The randomly appearing film frame numbers, act as markers of time passing and make clear that this is a photograph, a mere fragment of a moment.
           
Throughout this work, notions of dislocation, the passing of time, disruption of childhood, and the fleeting nature of memory are all intermingled.  The past, it would seem, is perfect only in the mind's eye.