Chloe Spreckley

Artist Catalogue

Virtual Exhibition

Untitled

I’m navigating a landscape of self, informed by my experiences and familial history, tied to and informed by notions of collective memory and archival praxes. I manifest memory as a ‘landscape,’ mapped out in multidisciplinary modes of making - video, sculpture, and installation. As an abstract, collective memory requires the use of the archive to ‘activate’ the narrative being developed. The archive exists predominantly to assist this process of remembrance. Memory and the archive work in tandem to engender the material connection between aspects of identity and experiences (DeSilvy, 2017: 13).

Objects are used as prompts for memory by individuals and communities to materialise elements of identity and experience, highlighting how objects, and the preservation of objects, allows for a tangible and controlled connection between oneself and the spaces we occupy (DeSilvy, 2017:13). The kind of desperate yearning to be present and to have some evidence of ourselves appears asserted onto collecting.

A collection of objects, images, and videos can function as an island of lost moments, a repository of memory and experience. By incorporating art-making into the realm of archival praxes, the resulting work can function as a mode of moving between an incomplete past and a recrudescing future (Foster, 2004: 15). I draw simultaneously from ‘real’ and imagined sources to fabricate a landscape which functions as a repository of fictional memory. The concept of an archive, formal or informal, establishes the materials as found and constructed. The knowledge presented and the ‘value’ of such a collection is that it constructs a narrative, and in this construction, the narrative becomes inherently factual and fictional (Foster, 2004: 5).

Materially, there is deconstruction and reconstruction by collecting and combining these materials curatorially. It becomes representative of a history that ceases to be mine and simultaneously becomes mine for the first time.

The intangible nature of my own archive, these reworked pieces of found footage, and the various other pieces exist in a kind of no-place and have the potential to present something hopeful and idealistic within the critique. The fragmented state of this no-place practice of collecting is representative of something, but it is also something to be worked through, an undoing and a beginning that is absurd and anomic (Foster, 2004: 21).

What is it to step into an experience that is not yours? There is an idea of archivists as tourists. Through re-imagining these experiences as a tourist rather than an archivist and interacting with these remnants of the memories of others there is an ever-growing feedback loop of seeing and experiencing through video.

This work could represent an opportunity for what it means to be human and have shared experiences. Not through the homogenous and ultimately exclusive notions of collective memory but through the re-experiencing of moments, memories, and the collectiveness of seeing and experiencing them as they exist in memoriam. To share is to generate a new experience - it is transformative. Is this not the most earnest purpose of an archive? A collecting of materials, memorabilia, which allows for a mapping of something? A story, an understanding, a space, a history? Isn’t collecting still just a yearning to remember? To re-experience and to be a part of something, whether fictional or factual, to map out what would be the desired lines of our existence, a comfort to the absurdity of the human experience at this time and in this place.