Memory is embedded in the fabric of our lives. From our DNA to the images and sounds that brings us back to salient moments in our lives. I come from a lineage of storytellers: my art shows the story of the human experience, something anthropologists have been trying to capture since the term ‘colonialism’ arrived. I am interested in the processes of capturing memory through photography, film, and paint. I am also interested in the small, hidden moments of life and how they can be highlighted in the public eye.

One example of this type of moment in process is human interaction with the machine. These processes are ways to transfer ephemeral moments of life into permanence, or deep observation.  I like using photographs and developing them into other pieces of art using thread, paint, or print--Thus interrupting the immediate gratification that technology offers us. Media industries, commodity capitalism, and digital technologies have altered the practices and possibilities of collective remembering and individual memory. Representations of the past both individual and collective, are forged, deposited, and exchanged in virtual and oral space.

In my creative research, I examine the linkages between memory and history with attention to the fields of power in which the struggle for domination over remembrance, retrievable historical consciousness, and collective forgetting takes place.

Ultimately, my art interrogates the complex political, social, historical and psychological underpinnings of memory and erasure. 

-Bailey Dann, 2017