Chimera, 49222

By Patrick Heagney

Piece description from the artist

Chimera

You think you remember exactly what happened.
 
You don’t.
 
Your memories are retellings of a story. Like a message in a game of telephone, each time you repeat the story the more it gets distorted, changed from its original form into something new.  Memories are colored by emotions—what you felt when the story began, what you feel when the memory is recalled.  When you retell this story, to others or to yourself, you create a new story. Over time, the facts become more altered, less accurate.  

After two people experience something together, their stories begin to diverge.  Years later, two similar but subtly different recollections will emerge, the differences and overlaps between them obscuring the original events.
 
An elaborated form of photographic multiple exposure is used to create these images.  A subject is photographed against a plain background.  That original photo is then loaded onto a digital projector and projected back onto the subject, creating a live double exposure and dual depictions of the subject.  While this is happening, the subjects are photographed with a long exposure.  The long exposure introduces the element of time, and the subjects move around during this process.  The resulting photo is the final portrait.

In this way, two different interpretations of the same people are recorded at once, along with the blurring element of time.  By combining two different versions of the same subject, the viewer is given contradictory and overlapping renditions of the event.  As a result, they are left only with an interpretation of the story, not an accurate representation of the moment.