The Memorial Screening (1974) is a fabricated video memorial comprised of photographs and home-movie excerpts of me and my family. Intentionally set to mawkish 1970s pop tunes, the funereal video presents a self-portrait as a teen in the wake of my presumed death. I'm remembered from three familial points of view, brother and sister, mother, and father. The fictional portrayals exploit the connotative nature of photography to insinuate a tragic and emotive story. An installation version of the work was the focal point of a larger exhibition titled "Nature Mort", inspired by a post-Columbine “kids who kill” culture.
Daniel Chapman, a web developer, and I broke ground on the site June 8, 2015. My desire was to create a comprehensive space to house my art and corresponding activities, which include writing, teaching, screenings and my work in the field of contemporary psychoanalysis. Images of works from, and installation views of, exhibitions in most cases represent a portion of what was shown. The site is updated on an ongoing basis.
Site technical specifications are as follows: for back-end development, we used Rails with a Postgres database with rspec for testing; AWS and Heroku for hosting of the files and site. For the front-end work, traditional javascript and jQuery work, with Sass for design.
I’m grateful to Daniel for his expertise, creativity and commitment. For more information about Daniel and his work, click here.