Containment Failure
Containment Failure is a body of work exploring the virtual environment’s ability to influence memory. When recalling a memory, the distance in time from the original events and your own imagination distort and damage the images evoked by your mind. Overtime, this results in a heavily abstracted snapshot.
I am interested in the tension between my own childhood memories that I made when growing up in the UK, and the new memories I have created more recently within video game spaces. Some of these digital spaces bear a passing resemblance to locations from my childhood, and there is an overlay between these locations that forms a strain on my ability to clearly recall specific locations from my childhood. I have been exploring this strain through painting and sculpture.
Immigrating away from family for long periods without contact creates invisible rifts of connection. This results in a fear of losing both the memory and the relationship itself. I am not attempting to reconstruct a more ‘authentic’ or ‘true’ image of my memories, but rather to capture a sense of how these memories from my childhood are increasingly overlapping with my more recent memories of spaces from video games. Within the video game space, screen tearing and visual glitches undermine its illusion of reality, as misalignment and disruption of the image inevitably occur. This sense of instability is shared with memory.
The boundaries between virtual spaces and the spectral space of memories might be impossible to merge. This project utilises painting and sculpture to explore the areas of friction between these two sites, acting as both an archive of my memory and an expression of their aesthetic similarities.