Threshold, Suyama Space, Seattle, WA, 2013

I am interested the ways that the cities and buildings and landscapes we carry in our minds that don’t quite line up with external reality.  Cities in space and the cities in memory are both mutable, shifting, continually revised and rewritten as different visions of the future and the past are imagined or preserved or erased. For “Threshold,” I tried to conjure up this dynamic city from my mind.  I developed a sculptural process that is a kind of collage, but instead of paying attention to what I see or empirical built structures, my goal is to replicate the hybridity, metamorphic fluidity, promiscuous and impressionistic processes of memory itself.

Suyama Space is, itself, haunted for me by the memory of an installation I made here in 2000.
I used the memory of that installation as a conceptual blueprint for the current installation—buildings in “Threshold” were (at least initially) laid out in the footprint of the (mis)remembered past.  I tried to be rigorous in my observation of the distorted and dreamlike representations of buildings and cities in my head and to faithfully document the ongoing cycle of forgetting and misremembering.

Installation photographs are by Mark Woods.