A white ribbon by Vered Terry
I believe that what I paint today is connected tightly to childhood memories. I check old photographs and find that the visual connection is very remote. ( They rarely captured Landscape in those events, but I know it was there). The episode in the photos – I do not remember. I know “being photographed” in those days was an ” event”. It was very significant, excitement was there, so the memory of the event was processed deeply and likely to be remembered . The collection of old photographs I have is a collection of such events. I DO NOT REMEMBER ANY OF THEM. They become darker and covered or fade and disappear. i forgot the names of people and then I forgot their faces. Semantic memory complements and lies. For example here – it complements the place – Deborah’s kindergarten in Purim. We sang and played the percussions. (I have clues; I don’t remember any of it) I call all this collection simply “Old Photo”, knowing that it has crucial importance of who I am today but do not know what it is. Episodic memories shimmer in increasing gaps. The holes in this net are getting bigger and bigger.
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Title of work A White Ribbon (components of memory)
Size of work ( either cm or inches) Digital file, about 600 kb
Style (realism, abstract, expressionism etc) conceptual – pading realizm
Technique, Medium & material used oil painting and an old photo digitally manipulated
Date work was completed (only submit work of the current year) June
The inter-textural play on associative memory and identity, in the act of forgetting in the face of memoir, forges such visual simplicity woven by iconographic complexity as to be a visual novella. The episodic loss of knowledge of a self unknown at the time renders the emblematic entity of an ‘Old Photo’ into a rich elemental palette, poignant both by substance and absence. The delicacy of moral dilemma in a personal search for an idea of being beyond the reach of oneself beyond a point of cogniscent history and memory making, makes the title even more of a landscape then the floral imposition of a place timely rendered for all its natural indistinction. Beautiful
This is wonderful, Vered!
Vered Terry
I loved this art piece the moment I saw it although I thought it was about your daughters & memories of their childhood. I guess the memories could be about any timeline of memory. Do our memories really reflect what actually happened? Probably not & you have captured this uncertainity. Memories that are most remembered are those the family talks about, those that our a part of every holiday even if they are horrible memories. Every year in December my Mother started telling us about how her Father was found dead in the Garage, he had been killed by Hanging. This put a big damper on the Christmas Holiday for me, because it brought murder into our lives. My Mother became distraught, angry because her life changed drastically after the killing of her Dad. She was never able to move on but was stuck in the muder of her Father forever.
So perhaps your inability to clearly remember is a Healthy thing.