Random Memory
Installation, photographs, red and white paint, glass, White Water Gallery, North Bay, Ontario, 1996.

"Random Memory" is an exploration of narrative structures, memory, and their interaction. It continues my investigation into the intersection of history and records of womens activities and representations that began with the "Imagination of Pain" project in Prague (1995).
We often remember via narrative, but every day the story changes. The process is one of selection and rejection, pieces get left out while others shift, blending together or even being invented. Fragments of memory can appear without being deliberately recalled. This process of appearance and disappearance is continual. The order may slip, so what was once the beginning can now become the end and vice versa.

Chronological attempts at recovery are fallible, since memory does not seem to be linear. Intersections and borders blur in the process of structuring a memory. And what happens when the memories are bilingual? Are there then two different memories? The shift in focus from my earlier work is a move from the concept of architecture as a site of memory to an investigation of the body as a seat of memory. The claim that "The body remembers what the mind forgets" is currently highlighted by the possibilities of stories embedded at a cellular or molecular level: DNA as a site of inscription.

The installation: The text, written in white paint on black tiles, is the ground upon which the viewer walks. Fragments of Czech and English texts mingle together. The narrative fragments follow a woman¹s disappearance from life. The character explored exists only through memories that someone has written down. The text takes the form of prose, commands and advertisements as it shifts voices from "she" to "you" to "I". Contrasting with the handmade mark of the written words are 250 photographs ranging in size from 5" to 16". The content of the photographs include fragments of scenes, lanscapes and fragments of a women in various settings without ever revealing her face, her identity.

They support the mystery by leading the viewer into constructing a narrative. Fragments of a body and a variety of settings deliver clues but not enough on their own complete the tale.