Diane Meyer
When researching the idea of memory projects in the area of art, I found an artist who used images from her childhood and the parts in the image which she could not remember, she would sew into the image to illustrate the pixilation. Los Angeles-based artist Diane Meyer has been using old family photographs showing her childhood in rural New Jersey, and meticulously embroidering them with chunky pixel-like cross stitch that both enhances and obscures the images of the past.
Her project is called ‘Time Spent that Might Otherwise Be Forgotten’, and like the distorted remembrances of the distant past, all of her images communicate with what is clear and what is abstracted. She quoted “the images show naive, ideal moments – Christmas morning, posing with a new bicycle – when in fact, our childhood was fairly traumatic”. This illustrates that her images build upon layers of memory that are realistic but also unrealistic, showing which is fake about the images. Here, sharply idealized moments in photographic form contrast with the often harsh realities of life blurred in a fading memory.
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