2016 Imaginary Friends Series

Memory, like technology, obsolesces. Like the eager anticipation of the newest smartphone, compulsive human motion and consumption ultimately lead to the hastening of our physical, cultural, and social deterioration. As time passes, objects and photographs slowly replace our connection to feelings held by our younger selves. Imaginary Friends is a series of black and white 35mm film photograph triptychs that jumble distinctions of affect associated with past, present, and future. Seeking neither nostalgia nor suppression of memory, this project questions notions of authenticity, subjectivity, and truthfulness in how we relate to and simultaneously distance ourselves from childhood joys and traumas.



About Now I Lay Me Down to Sleep: "This triptych of 35mm photographic prints eloquently invokes a host of ideas including memory, childhood, gender, ritual, and religion. The classic black and white granular film evokes a sense of nostalgia as do the rituals of being tucked into bed night after night with bedtime prayers from the Christian tradition referenced by the title of this piece. The archetypical teddy bear (or some such soft item) is often a significant ritual object of childhood used for inducing comfort, sleep, and play. In this series, it also serves to stand in for the artist's younger self. The teddy slowly drifts off to sleep through the blurring lens of the camera. This progressive blurriness could also feel like the fading of memories, the passing of time, even the distance and separation we feel from our childhood rituals, beliefs, and 'imaginary friends.'"
-Sarah Bernhardt, Executive Director of Intersect Arts Center and curator of the exhibition Ritual, May-September, 2021

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