Meka Tome

Is This Living? (2020) was my response to the Covid-19 pandemic. It consists of an apple with an eye printed on it through the silver gelatin process. When did the apple stop living? When it stopped growing? When it was picked from the tree? The moment I cut it in half only to smother it in silver iodide? What about days later when it still felt crisp enough to consume, then continued to change? This project prioritizes the process of change, declining to provide answers through a final outcome. Each time I photographed the apple, I watched the eye age as the surface of the apple wrinkled, which finally became engulfed by new growth that prevented the eye from seeing or being seen. If we are not growing, are we still living? 

Encode, Store, Retrieve (2021) incorporates each of memory’s stages through the photographic imprinting of a memory in a leaf, storage within a block of ice whose structural integrity is at the will of its environment, and exhibiting a process of slow memory recall through melting. This piece also addresses the malleability of a memory, namely retrieval-induced distortion and reconsolidation, rendering the leaf preserved by the ice altered and mangled once it emerged.

Veiled Memories (2022) is an interactive installation that includes several handheld vials containing photographs suspended in water. It builds upon ideas from Encode, Store, Retrieve (2021) as a further exploration of the preservation and fragility of memories as they live as their own entities. Like memories, the images in the vials are constantly subject to change and reinterpretation depending on numerous variables including mood, past experiences, fragments that are revealed, and their environment. Visitors are encouraged to hold and manipulate the vials occupying the light table designed for a child’s height. The preserved images’ lives will come to an end just as ours do and our memories fade: the photographic emulsion will have completely disintegrated in six months, rendering each vial’s contents a past memory.