Bretta Ballou Ringo

Collected Memories

Foregrounding the relationship between photography, drawing, memory, and female subjectivity, my work explores both the meaning of presence, absence and the desire for connectivity to a past experience.

The key questions I am exploring are:  what is the act of memory?  How have photographs functioned as domestic media of memory, and how might these ideas be incorporated into a more personal investigation of memory and female subjectivity? What types of narrative are constructed through this process where images undergo inclusion, exclusion and various re-framings?  In my process of editing images into icons of memory created through the reordering images, recreation of composition, reemphasis of subject all accompanied by personal drawing constitutes a recreation of narrative memory.  In answering these questions, I attempt to theorize how domestic photography and personal objects functions as triggers of memory.

My works draw from both memory and photo to establish a conversation between actuality (domestic photographs) and the personal (recalled memories). These aspects are explored in relation to postmodern discourses about memory and subjectivity and are reconstructed into "objects" of memory.  In these images, I attempt to integrate ideas about photography as a medium of memory along with a strategy to recreate the "aura" of the subject/object lost through the process of photography, by overdrawing on the digitally recreated photo using graphite.  In so doing, I contest ideas about a photograph being an end and instead create interplay between the impersonal separation of an altered memory (the photo) and the personal attention to individual objects (drawing) that hold their own individual triggers of personal memories. 

Virginia Woolf describes these personal recollections as "a token of some real thing behind the appearances of ones own memory."  Ones own memory is a "packrat" a collection of significant, insignificant, and subsonscious "truths" that continually untermingle and alter through time and experience yet are never discarded.