Go Back, Go Back

“Go Back, Go Back” is an on-going lens-based project that concerns the recollection, reconstruction and failure of memory, manifesting as memento mori and the closing chapter of 50 years of family history while simultaneously exploring spatial, historical and photographic ambiguity. Building upon an 18-year archive-driven body of work investigating intergenerational communication and the passage of cultural currency, “Go Back, Go Back” employs the artist’s ancestral home as the site for the projection of photographs from early childhood onto the same surfaces and spaces from which they were taken nearly 4 decades ago. The resulting photographic works blur the lines between past and present, memory and vision, surface and screen, analog and digital, real and implied texture.

Engaging pictorial strategies that draw upon collage and deconstructed narratives of portraiture and permanence, the images confuse physicality, presence and illusion in ways rendered evermore complex through the two-dimensional printing of the images. The photographs explore the margins of recollection and test representational limitations of lens-based media through a poetic interpretation of the interplay of the archive and observation. Fleeting and fading memories, broken links between generational connections and the final pages in a vernacular familial history linger at the fringes of the mundane, wherein surfaces serve as screens for the projection, physical possession and embodiment of decades old memories.

“Go Back, Go Back” is dedicated to the memory of the artist’s mother, Jane Rita Wiemann Treadaway.

Select images from the series are part of the permanent collections at the Ogden Museum of Southern Art in New Orleans and at the Masur Museum of Art in Monroe, LA. The work been exhibited at Agora Gallery in Chelsea and has been recognized by The Houston Center for Photography, the Lucie Foundation, Musée Magazine, Shots Magazine, Postscript Magazine and the New Orleans Photo Alliance.