Time and Time Again: Fiction, Family, and Photography is a group exhibition of seven artists who grapple with how to represent personal memories of the past in the present. Pat Garcia, Krista Gay, Issey Goold, Martha Naranjo Sandoval, Benjamin Salesse, Motohiro Takeda, and Vivian Vivas each recreate personal histories through material and photographic means. The works in this exhibition reveal the ways in which our memories of family—often captured in photographs—are constructed, narrativized, and assembled.
The artists in Time and Time Again invoke images of family and respond to the memories they conjure through film, sculpture, photography, and installation. In some cases, the artists return to early photographic practices or enact interventions into found images. In others, physical photographs from family archives are used as source material for new work. This conceptual gesture mirrors the psychological process of memory recollection, in which memories are constructed anew with each instance of recall.
The artworks in this exhibition employ techniques such as collage, overexposure, and image layering to visualize the fictions inherent in personal memory. The results are speculative, abstract, or fabricated, and highlight both the power and limitations of the photograph to capture one’s memories. Goold and Takeda use analog photographic processes to imagine a familial past, while Garcia’s photograms recontextualize his family archive with found and stylized materials. Salesse’s film weaves together a narrative of the artist’s memories of his parents, while Naranjo Sandoval cuts out and reconstitutes figures from childhood photographs. Gay’s installation of digitally altered images of family and Vivas’s obscured photograph of her father paired with a text written in braille point to the limitations of using photography to access the past. As their works suggest, photography can withhold, fragment, and conceal meaning.
Responding to the limits of a photograph to tell a full story, the artists in Time and Time Again often rely on elements of fiction—speculation, imagination, and fabrication—to explore and reimagine stories about their families. The exhibition’s title hints at the collapse of linear time, made possible through the artists’ unique engagements with their pasts in the present moment. By revisiting family albums, personal archives, oral histories, and individual memories, the artists reconstruct lost family members, recount lived experiences, and critically revisit the past through acts of visual storytelling.
The exhibition will be accompanied by a conversation with participating artists moderated by the curator on Thursday, March 27, at 6:00pm.
Time and Time Again: Fiction, Family, and Photography is curated by Victoria Horrocks. Horrocks is the Curatorial Fellow, Photography, at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York. She is a writer and art historian based in Brooklyn.