Eric Perez

We are shaped by memory.  Memories inform our decisions, our personalities, and ground us in a certain history.  But what happens when we become strangers to our own memories? Whether through avoidance or through the distortion that occurs when a memory bounces too many times in the echo chamber of our minds, we can become alien to our pasts.  However disconnected we may feel from this past, it still colors and shapes our present.

My practice is an exercise in reconciling my past with my present self through the exploration of traumatic memories.  My reflection is spurred by neglected photographs and the objects from my time in the military which still surround me.  Through the manipulation of image code, projection and drawing, I am interested in the transformation of memory through time and the transformation of an image through the insertion of memory.  I uncover a past obscured by PTSD. Memories manifest as glitches. Glitches represent my friends. Through these pieces I ask, is it important to hold on to painful memories in order to honor the dead or are these memories fated to be lost through the distortion of time and distance?