Things I’ve Forgotten

2018

Things I’ve forgotten incorporates audio, object-making, sculptural installation, and performance to explore the relationship between trauma, memory and the body.

The project is based on a very specific, mostly-forgotten childhood memory. In this memory, I’m three years old, riding a Big Wheel tricycle. The central object is an adult-sized big wheel tricycle modified to broadcast, while the wheels are in motion, a recording of me reciting a list of all the dreams I can remember (over 300 dreams) through a speaker mounted on the trike. While the modified tricycle is a self-contained work suitable for gallery installation, the work is designed to be performative, allowing me to take the work into public spaces where I can share my dreams with the public. 

When I was a toddler, I was cycling on my Big Wheel trike when I was abducted by two young boys. Though this event has been indelibly marked in my memory, I have no recollection of what took place after the boys approached me and began to mock me for being a chubby little kid. My mother has her own very specific, but very different set of memories related to this event; she was not present when the boys approached me, but she is the one who went looking for me after I disappeared. I’m fascinated by the ability of our brains to block out traumatic events from our conscious memory, but their inability to prevent those events from making their mark in ways that impact us into adulthood. I often wonder how much this childhood trauma had a role in the formation of my personality, my physicality, or my disabilities. The sound system will only play while the trike is in motion; (in the gallery, it can be mounted in place and use a kinetic energy device to allow the dreams to be played while keeping the large front wheel in perpetual motion); during the live performance of the work, I am required to keep cycling as long as I want the audience to be able to hear the work. For the performance, I do not stop moving for the duration of the audio track (approximately two hours) or longer; this endurance piece requires me to continue seeking resolution for an event that cannot be resolved. It is endless, exhausting, manic.

The audio track will be a digital recording of me reading a list of the three hundred dreams I’d written in my dream journal to that date (dreams which I forget soon after writing them down). The dream synopses are short and vivid; examples include: “I dreamed that a bear got into the house and was generally not a problem until I was home alone one day and it became extremely violent. I managed to wrestle it into a giant duffel bag and lock it in the office, though I barely survived” and “I dreamed I held an annual candy hunt in a giant pile of sand. It was very popular with people of all ages.” The fact that I forget most of my dreams soon after I write them down (just as most of us forget our dreams shortly after waking) means that revisiting my dreams is a parallel experience to remembering a long-forgotten memory. 

The performance of the work acts as a visual corollary to the absurdity of this bizarre stream of dreams; an oversized toy ridden by an oversized adult. I recognize from myriad past performative experiences, as well as being a woman that exists in the world in a taboo body, that challenging peoples’ expectations of behaviour and appearance in public can be threatening and elicit defensive and aggressive reactions. Presenting a potentially threatening situation in a way which harnesses cuteness, cartoonishness, or childishness usually disarms aggression long enough to allow for a vulnerability that is affective of both the artist and the audience (or the subject and the witness). This is an ongoing goal through my work – to affect the audience in ways that may be quiet and subtle yet significant, and to be affected in ways that change me and help to evolve my work. 

Through this project, I am attempting to set in motion a process by which I can trigger the emergence of memories long-buried by past trauma. This experiment in personal betterment and catharsis through the creative process has a long art historical tradition. In my own practice, this type of experiment walks a tightrope between earnestness and cynicism; setting up (usually hilariously futile) challenges to my personal limitations, and attempts to make myself into something that I am not serve to highlight the futility of the search for perfection and the altogether human desire for knowledge. 

Things I’ve Forgotten is the newest in an ongoing series of large, prop-based performative works that have marked the pathway of my artistic career. Early works included Plexiglass Box, in which I attempted to give the public the opportunity to see a “real artist at work” by walking around the city in a large, extremely heavy plexiglass box on wheels, challenging passersby to deny that the work I was doing was incredibly difficult. The more recent work Mighty Men and Mistress Maker is a lifesized toy bed which encourages the audience to design and create an image of their ideal lover from a selection of diverse body parts of different shapes, sizes, and genders. In this work, the participants become the performers of a titillating spectacle, as the process necessitates laying on the bed with their chosen “lover,” rubbing a crayon over their body parts in order to create the image. My most recent performative installation, Crash Pad, takes a closer look at my relationship to my own body and personal histories; an oversized pill packet holding a pill-shaped mattress is simultaneously a rocking cradle and dangerous obstacle that functions as a metaphor for my relationship to medication, my disability, and my body itself. Things I’ve Forgotten follows in this trajectory, as work designed to explore the human condition through interrogating personal history. 

I identify as an artist with a taboo body, and that identity plays a major role in my artistic practice. As an artist who identifies intersectionally as a queer, disabled, fat white woman, social justice is a foregrounded concern within my practice. My work relies heavily on an ability to integrate theories of the “other” (fat, queer, feminist, disability, gender and craft theories in particular) with a strong vocabulary in popular culture. By acknowledging my position as “other,” I can employ methods of intervention and collaboration, allowing me to work simultaneously from without and within the cultures and subcultures that form my communities of interest, of which I am also a member. I believe it is a key moment for the artistic exploration of trauma; that we exist in a historical moment which is ripe for the tearing open of deeply held cultural beliefs and prejudices which have presumed entire groups of people inferior to others, subjecting them to institutionalized cruelty and oppression. I feel that artists have a unique ability and therefore a responsibility to hold a mirror up to society and if not offer solutions (I don’t really think that artists have the solutions to society’s ills), then at least create imagery that allows the viewer to imagine that there are alternatives to the status quo.