In the neurological function of the brain, our conscious desire and repeated efforts to mentally conjure a moment from the past can be precisely what unravels any clear connection to that time. The more someone calls up a remembered experience, the more easily the accuracy of the recollection falls apart, becoming altered with each new visitation of the mind. As we summon a memory—the sensation of being near and directly engaged with an event as it happened—our minds instead reflect through our present realm of accumulated knowledge and the person we have become in the interim. We think back and the original experience is now viewed through veils of time between now and then.

We use photographs to document our lives and to aid in the collection of memories. They appear to function like a portal over time between sets of eyes. In them, we see the moment that existed between the photographer looking through the camera and their subject. The viewer holds the second set of eyes and may be the very same that snapped the picture, but the experience of looking at the subject has changed. Now, the act becomes about looking at a representation of what was once experienced. The memory of the moment is replaced by memory of the photographic object.

A photograph is not a recollection, however, but the photographic object is saturated with a feeling of looking back. A photograph is of mirage of memories. In my paintings, I am interested in this illusion, and work from photographic images or found objects to explore the significance of these pictures as we search their surfaces for some connection to another time or person. In my paintings, I echo the experience of looking through pictures as a medium might channel spirits.

In a way, I am working to establish contact with the subjects through the membrane of the paint or surface of paper. The original context is gone—often lost entirely—but I allow for my memory to confabulate the missing details. I am drawn to images that share the everyday spaces of my life; suburbs, hospitals, the endless fields stared at through the car window on long drives in the American West. They are a brief glance in a fraction of a second examined over months or even years. I search through the fleeting moment of a photograph like a detective at the scene of a crime.

Often, I think about distance; distance over land, through time, across the picture plane, between bodies, and from one’s skin to the microcosm within. I seek to compress notions of near and far, then and now, reality and dream, and you and I into a picture where those distances become indeterminate and simultaneous. By making distance flat, we can contact anyone, anywhere, all the time. Perhaps, through my paintings, I can help the viewer reach that silver band of water shimmering just below the horizon on a hot day. There, they may feel something that feels like a memory of their own.

Erin Cunningham

Questions can be directed to erincunningham.artist@gmail.com

All images on this website are property of the artist

2024