Re-presented home videos

This project is explores the boundaries of personal memories in the broader context of history. By blurring boundaries between past and the present, and by fusing the old and the new, the recorded and the remembered, the project questions the originality of what is being presented and perceived.

In this project I sit down with individual viewers, one at a time, and recall memories of growing up in northern Minnesota. At the same time, five super 8 projectors show short film clips illustrating my stories. In actuality these films are re-recordings from other peoples home movies found on the Internet. The film loops are destroyed through repeated playback and are replaced by new pieces. Echoing these changes are the mutations taking place in the spoken narrative, which is modified from session to session, allowing the installation to evolve organically through the run of the show.

“Re-presented home Movies” explores the structures of private and public history, culture and memory. It reveals the drastic differences between the factual reality and the distortions created by modernist structures that dictate how we understand the world around us.