A New Visual Memory

These two pictures are from the Useful Links website given us to help us with our artist books. The artist's name is Virgilio Ferreira and she is an example of an artist working with memory and the photograph. The artist's description of her work is this: "It is between opposite poles – logic and magic, the rationality and irrationality – that I intend to work. I consider that some of these images seem to relate to a seemingly obscure archive of our unconscious memories." The way that these pictures are created is by using a double exposure to overlap two moments in time in the same place. The overall effect is a very blurred and surreal representation of reality that does in fact seem to physically represent the way that many of our memories appear to us after the fact. These images are not particularly clear and neither are those images that we remember. In some ways though, these photographs remind me more of not-quite-remembered dreams rather than memories, because often memories actually are remembered as specific images rather than just blurred ones. Ferreira also states that "the presence of the two physical and chronological layers in the same image mesh into diaphanous lights and ethereal atmospheres; this visual effect contradicts the ordinary flow of perception." In this way she is dealing with the way we perceive ourselves and perceive memory but she manipulates the visual, changing it to something we don't quite actually remember. This gave me a new interesting way to think about memory visually. I really like these photographs.
On another note, these pictures are really interesting in the way the double image is displayed. I really enjoy the way the light filters through both of these pictures as well. There also almost appears to be a shadow person floating in the clouds in the second one.