Madeleine Preston

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Articles of photographic faith and the anxiety of total recall

What if nothing is forgotten? What does this mean in the context of computing and memory? How is memory configured via the online images of Facebook’s photo album? What are the implications for the image and artists practice.

The fear of too much memory is the correlative of the fear of forgetting. The anxiety now is not in what will be lost, but in what will be understood by what is kept. And in a digital age everything can be kept; everything remembered. The fear of an excess of images is in part a fear of being drowned out. Saturated. What this articulation of too much doesn’t explicitly address is the not the fear that all stories will be drowned out but that a story, your story, will be drowned out.

The photo album in Facebook is the site of image excess that is often cited as an article of faith in the anxious argument about memory and forgetting in a digital age. If Facebook’s own statistics are to be believed 800 million active users post photos constantly across time zones and cultures in a confusion of images that is unprecedented.

Using pre-digital and digital era analysis of images and image making the paper will examine the anxiety around total recall.

Madeleine Preston is an artist, curator and tutor at College of Fine Arts UNSW. She has a Master of Fine Arts from RMIT and is a director of Home@735 Gallery.

Preston works with archival materials including photos, everyday objects and paintings to create installations that suggest alternative histories. The installations use temporary display conventions such as shop-front signage, posters, mock social media pages and slide projections along with more traditional display methods such as vitrines and plinths.

Preston’s work, ‘Darlinghurst eats its Young’ informs her presentation Articles of photographic faith and the anxiety of total recall. ‘Darlinghurst eats its Young’ was created from a photo archive and to date has had four iterations.

Preston has exhibited widely including Low Relief, curator Connie Anthes, Damien Minton Gallery, Sydney, on this day alone-Octopus 13 curator Glenn Barkley, Gertrude Contemporary, Melbourne
, and Cement Town: Placing Cementa13 at Kandos, curator Jo Holder, Cross Art Projects, Sydney.

http://www.madeleinepreston.com.au/work/