This work is to explore the static performance of memory in dynamic time. My friend is the protagonist in the photo, and what is recorded is a conversation between me and her about memory. This is the memory of a conversation between me and her from my viewpoint, the expression and documentation of the memory in the present time. For her, it is the experience she recalled in the past, and the memories that happened in the past are recorded through her facial expressions. The feelings you have when you see this work are memories that happened in the future.
Duan, JX. (2021) I think what I think [oil painting].
150 x 140 cm
Camberwell, London
Sort of images of work in a gallery situation
Artist's Statement
My current work deals with the fragmentary nature of our human consciousness that is made up of the interaction between our memories and our accumulating experience.
In this work, the action of the audience, video-ed in real-time by a camera, is projected in technologically enhanced colour onto a painted canvas of disembodied body parts and anonymous portraits. So the audience, representing current, lived experience, overlays the painted sea of shifting, fragmented memories and imaginations. Here memory and real-time merge and the audience become part of the art creation. Interaction of artist, 'sitter' and audience, traditional and contemporary art technologies, and between past and present is created.
I have been influenced by Metzger's 'auto-destructive' and 'auto-creative' art which is painting that develops over time, with acid, and natural processes. ( Wilson, 2008) My artwork is also 'auto-destructive' and 'auto-creative’ but uses interactive digital technology to allow my painting to ‘auto-create’.
Having started out as a painter, I began to use mixed media including collaging painting with ceramic and fabric, and now have started including interactive digital techniques.
For the current work, I collaborated with interaction designer GriffinKoo, creating a programming language by MAX/MSP software program and then projected it on my painting. The movements and sounds of the audience, through the programme, generate changes and shifts in the quality and colour of the images projected.
My research has engaged with the idea of memory in three ways: firstly with the idea of implicit memory and explicit memory proposed by Graf and Schacter(1985, p.501). Secondly, with temporal aspects of memory: sequential and disordered. Thirdly, with the emotional implications of a changing environment on our present experience and memory of the past.
Reference:
Graf, P. and Schacter, D. L. (no date) ‘Implicit and Explicit Memory for New Associations in Normal and Amnesic Subjects’, p. 18.
Wilson, A. (2008) ‘Gustav Metzger’s Auto‐Destructive/Auto‐Creative Art: An Art of Manifesto, 1959–1969’, Third Text, 22(2), pp. 177–194. doi: 10.1080