Memento-ry

Collecting stories from individuals through postcards and photo slides all thrifted in New York. Stripped of their sentimental value, these stories, whether written or contained within a frame, aim to resonate with the intimacy of others through simple and poetic embroidery and assembling. Both photo slides and postcards have been re-invested from their original purposes, elevating the commonplace and disconnected moments to become expressive and perceptive observations. This process aims to bring out the impalpable of ordinary narratives and to reveal the emotional resonance for contemporary audiences.

Postcards blur the lines between public and private, allowing for the private to become public and vice versa. They serve as a medium for communicating personal thoughts, feelings, and experiences, but also function as a public announcement as the message can be read by anyone who comes into possession of it. While the use of photo slides in this work reinforces a sense of nostalgia and creates a sense of physicality and tangible presence, the juxtaposition of postcards and photo slides to our current modes of communication delves into our use of temporality. One other focus of this work is on investigating the use of language and handwriting, the impact of communication, the impact of memories (including their preservation and loss) through the ordinary narratives, and how they relate to the formation of a person's identity. The installation of these works reinforces the contrasts and metaphors they carry, and made to be interactive, these ‘pieces of memory’ are suspended as dirty laundry, referring to the idiomatic expression "airing one's dirty laundry in public" to openly discuss private and personal matters in a public