THINGS YOU WON'T REMEMBER
Yshia Wallace

Things you won't remember examines the act of preservation and the desire to preserve our fleeting experiences in an impermanent world. These paintings are close studies of still images taken from a degraded VHS tape, which is the only video record from the artist childhood. They document the deterioration of videotape, a process that is analogous to the deterioration of the human body over time, and with it, the mind's capacity for memory. The fallibility of the human mind compels us to obsessively record and reproduce our lives with whatever technologies are available to us at a given time. Initially, this kind of documentation (photographs, video or audio recordings) acts as a trigger for our memory, but over time it becomes the memory. It becomes the evidence, the traces, of our temporal existence, however imperfect and inadequate. With this series, Yshia Wallace acknowledges the essential futility of the act of documentation and memory preservation, but show compassion for our fundamental need to hold onto what is already gone.

 

 

Biography:
Yshia Wallace is a Toronto based artist whose practice includes painting, sculpture and animation. She has a BA in English Literature from McGill University and worked in the documentary production industry for 6 years before pursuing an art practice. In March 2011 she will be participating in a self-directed residency at the Banff Centre where she will build a model of a human superorganism.