The photograph may create a sense of nostalgia and longing for the past, but that past is not an authentic one. It is a past that has been mediated through a lens and by a photographer who is already mediated by cultural and societal norms and beliefs. Yet this past is both familiar and foreign at the same time. From Then Until Now is a series of visual investigations and physical manipulations of the photograph--particularly the snapshot. I utilize the photograph for its dual role as an objective index and as an aid for the subjective nature of memories. In this way the snapshot allows one to hold onto a physical object as well as construct an imagined past. By employing techniques of removal, erasure, and alteration, this exhibition addresses and complicates the snapshots ability to transcend its own objectness and materiality while simultaneously staging its disappearance as subject back to object
