How We Remember: Images Found and Made was the title of my August 2008 solo show at Big Car Gallery in Indianapolis in August, 2008. One of the works in this show was an installation of hundreds of plastic viewers that each contained a unique image. All together they created a cloud-like shape. The images in each viewer were from my collection of found images 35mm slides from the Midwest. These pictures depicted daily occurrences, special occasions, and family vacations. There were photos of weddings, napping children and farm families. This work explored memory and the way in which photography captures the "everydayness that Harry Harootunian writes about in his essay,"Shadowing the Story". The effort to create memories via the taking of a photograph acknowledges that in order to remember, we transform an experience into something that can be retrieved at a later date. The pleasure and pain of remembering remains strong, as memories are an integral part of human experience. We grieve memory loss both in ourselves and in those we love, for most of us believe that forgetting robs us of our own humanity and threatens our individual and collective survival. The collective nature of shared memories underscores our connectedness and reassures us that we may be remembered by others. Often the images in my collection are badly cropped, or poorly lighted or have re-emerged from dusty attics and damp basements. For me, as I work with the photos, these acts of signification and re-signification speak to the universal cycle of life and death.

Sometimes remembering takes on a deliberate quality, and other times a memory is triggered by a spontaneous reaction to a sound a scent, a story or an image. It seem that our individual memories become even more powerful, when they are shared with others. The cloud that I created was an interactive installation that encouraged people to select a viewer and hold it up to the light to see the image inside. Many of the images demonstrated how ordinary moments may have felt extraordinary to the person taking the picture. Many of the plastic viewers hung within reach, while others were out of reach, serving as a metaphor for memories that are elusive or cannot be recalled.

I will be creating a new, larger cloud, called Memory Cloud for the Indianapolis Museum of Art for a July 2009 exhibition.