Throughout our lives we encounter events and experience that reoccur year after year - birthdays, New Year’s celebrations, family vacations... Over time these repeated events blend together into an interwoven memory; a montage of the past and present that forms it’s own reality.

Among my earliest childhood memories are vivid impressions of annual visits to amusement parks. Expeditions to wonderfully strange places filled with laughter, sweet greasy smells, clamoring noise, and hyper blurred motion. Over time this experiece has accumulated into a rich strata of memory. One particular amusement park, a part of the Canadian National Exhibition, forms a large part of this memory. (The Canadian National Exhibition takes place every year during the last two weeks of August in the city of Toronto.) Over the years, from childhood to present day, visits to “the Exhibition” have become a rite of passage, a mandatory way to mark closure to another summer. My recollection of this annual event has become an assemblage of memories from throughout my life. Overlapping junctures of time and recollection stirred together to form a patchwork of past experience.

Corn Dogs and Candy Apples, (titled after two popular amusement park foods), is a visual exploration of my layered memories. Memory-like images are assembled by restructuring views of the amusement park as I remember them. Working with a pinhole camera, I piece together scenes using a technique I call 'in-camera montage'. This approach involves photographing segments of a view along a length of film, allowing overlapping exposures to blend into each other creating a fragmented reformation of the scene. Time is condensed from several moments into a single image. This results in what could be viewed as a filmstrip narrative when read along the exposures. The pinhole cameras’ ability to photograph lengthy exposures captures the passage of time rather than instants. Motion within an exposure becomes a smear, or completely vanishes. People are transformed into silhouettes or faint impressions; a record of their presence parallel to my memory of passing crowds. The results of Corn Dogs and Candy Apples is a fictitious, exaggerated memoryscape; a place closer to dreams than reality.

The Canadian National Exhibition website
www.theex.com

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