| I began the Constructions series in late 2005 while visiting London. I’d met up with a friend the day before and we’d stayed up for the sunrise, then I walked around the city the next afternoon. I was tired, but moving fast and shooting, looking all around, and checking my camera when I suddenly realized what I was doing, and started making records for the first works. I’d been reading pretty heavily in layman’s cognition and neurology, researching that perspective on aesthetics. That day, I’d been documenting my first impressions of the place, light flaring over roofs, forms that seemed large because they were new. |  |
Rebecca Kerlin
I began the Constructions series in late 2005 while visiting London. I’d met up with a friend the day before and we’d stayed up for the sunrise, then I walked around the city the next afternoon. I was tired, but moving fast and shooting, looking all around, and checking my camera when I suddenly realized what I was doing, and started making records for the first works.
I’d been reading pretty heavily in layman’s cognition and neurology, researching that perspective on aesthetics. That day, I’d been documenting my first impressions of the place, light flaring over roofs, forms that seemed large because they were new. Scrolling through the memory cards, I saw that in keeping only the snapshots that were true to what I was seeing, I was collecting distorted images that related primarily to each other and my state of mind. Crucially, they were analogous to the emotionally charged fragments that I knew would be all I’d easily recall of the trip.
Of course, we don’t remember bounded images. We remember scenes, even if indistinctly. Apparently, whether we’re remembering old history or seeing in the moment, our minds are making a good chunk of it up. Patterns are extended, anomalies dismissed, meaningful attributes emphasized. In addition to this automatic processing, we’re frequently moving and often distracted. Most of us travel habitual paths to which we map emotional associations and their distortions. So, when I’m reconstructing a memory, I reverse and resize images, skip and double, let the prints peel away from the ground.
I use oil paint to modify and extend the core. Where it contacts the photographs it degrades the paper over time. I’m working here with peripheral vision and that indistinctness of perception, but also with the camera’s artifacts and the contemporary belief that technology can cause a break with the past. That idea is somewhat true. Certainly I’m using speed, and hardware and software limitations as elements that only make sense today, but at the same time most of our tools are extensions of older methods and metaphors. Our bodies and our beliefs tell us how to use what we have at hand and how we acquired it. Enthusiasms change, interests shift, reexaminations occur. In these works, the printed images direct the paint, then the oil seeps in.
