Change the Past (Fragmented Memory)

Fragmented memory – forgetting days passed – is, and has always been, a great enemy of both myself and others. Students forget assignments, couples miss anniversaries, and the elderly argue over the forgotten interior color of their first car. Memories are easily displaced, or worse – remembered incorrectly. How the past is retold is how the past is defined. A person can change the past in the present. The day a friend forgot their sleeping bag on a camping trip can be the day that friend caught a cold or the day they wore socks on their hands and laughed all night. Both are true, but the past is changed by which one is divulged. The same bygone circumstance can become good or bad. 

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Change the Past (Fragmented Memory) is a refutation against Emilee French’s negative views of former experiences. The paintings display the fear of life lost when a memory is forgotten permanently. This body of work attempts to view prior experiences as positive ones, expressed through the brightness of each piece. However, the pieces never quite allow memories or the illustrated fragments to fit together in a way that is as clear as the tangible present. 

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Each fast-drying image is a selection of a personal past memory. Each occurrence, quickly passing, has a bad and a good connotation attached to it. Beginning with a large-scale continuous-line chalk drawing, the canvas is then filled with splinters of the original image, containing every space but the line. Therefore, these images are inverted continuous-line sketches. Emilee French’s process reflects the fractioned-off pieces that reminiscences hold, and even though all experiences are connected, it is usually not the connections that are seen, but the results of those connections. A desire is the effect — a desire to re-step into these larger-than-life scenes and enter the feelings before felt.