The Birthday, The Divorce explores the idea of memory in a projection of three videos and three still images. The three stills are based on photographs from my early birthday parties and the videos show my mother, my father, and my brother as I remember them during the conversation when my parents told us they were getting divorced.
Often when we think of memories from the past, we remember our memory of them more than the actual event—a memory of memory. Each memory is filtered through not only out own recollection, but also through the rest of our lives following the event. To present this concept, I play each of the “characters” in the videos and still images—my parents, my brother, and a younger version of myself. In addition, it is only through photographs and documented images that we see what we, ourselves, looked like. In this vein, I have not included myself in The Divorce. That is, I can remember what I was feeling during that conversation, but I do not know what I looked like. In The Birthday, on the other hand, I reference three photographs that include me along with my family.
Finally, thinking about memories and remembering our memories does not always yield a clearer understanding. As such, both sets of images change the longer a viewer looks at them: the still images from The Birthday grow more blurry and the videos from The Divorce slow down until the characters become almost unrecognizable, almost alien-like. The viewer can 'flip through' the memories but cannot control when they slow down or out of focus.