Remember Me, 2006

Remember Me was exhibited in a group show entitled New Installations, an exhibition of work by Wake Forest sculpture students. The projects were exhibited in the Electric Moustache Gallery in the Wherehouse, a multidisciplinary alternative space in downtown Winston Salem.

Remember Me is an exploration of how children begin to synthesize their personal identity by experiencing and performing the memories of others. It consists of three theaters of personal identity. In one corner a collection of dolls and other keepsakes such as a baseball trophy and Johnny West's horse stare at old family photographs and as if they were a film. Another corner is filled with books: Bibles, college literature texts, histories, illustrated science. The walls are marked with a child's response to a world of text and images, old stories becoming new again, fluidly flying between fact and fantasy. The third corner is filled with dresses: Grandmother dresses, Mother dresses, Aunty dresses, The small child filling the cloth not yet brought up into her own body (a body of the future) owns the pride and finesse of each debutante in her prime in every era. A family of rag dolls grows from the complicated cultural text of fabric, a text of time and place. The dolls are at tea, and the tea has been disturbed. Nothing inspires the imagination like a juicy family drama, no characters are more fascinating than familiar, loved, and intimidating adults.