Characters in a Mnemonic Theater
Super 8mm Transferred to HD video, Wood Physical Structure (2009)
This installation is comprised of three separate video edits of my Grandfather's Super 8mm film collection. It is a triangular structure, housing three interpretations of the films. The films are installed in three places, each visible from both outside and inside the space. The first two are in windows installed in the two doors to the structure and in the third is in the back corner of triangular structure, visible from the outside through a center window. It became a house house, a memory structure to visit these images, and hold them in my mind. In this way, the structure became one of Francis Yates Memory Theater’s, structures built in the mind to house our memories and display them back to us. Yates explains, “(memory theaters are) built of constructed mind and soul, and now that it is a windowed one … all things that the human mind can conceive and which we cannot see with the corporeal eye, after being collected together by diligent meditation may be expressed by certain corporeal signs in such a way that the beholder may at once perceive with his eyes everything that is otherwise hidden in the depths of the human mind. And it is because of this corporeal looking that he calls it a theater.”