As I reflect on this project, I am put in mind of a reading assigned by a professor during my freshman year.
In her essay “Arrival Gates,” Rebecca Solnit maintains that you can never wholly recreate a past moment. To do so would require you to be exactly who you were then, to know only what you knew at that point. Even as I think back on that reading, I cannot recall the name of the professor who assigned it. Instead I remember how her classroom lit up at sunset, how gentle her voice sounded, and how she cried for her daughter the class after election day. The mind is reliably unreliable. It records, reworks, fragments and misfiles our life events. Some recollections grow hazy and fade, while others persist with extreme specificity.
When we replay our memories, they may no longer faithfully correspond to what actually occurred. With each passing day our retrospections are those of an ever-more remote and unfamiliar self. These images engage with our pasts as shadowed, blurred, and reflected figures and moments in time. The pairings share similarities through tones and shapes yet elusively conflict as they ambiguously position the past within the present.