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Dana Haugaard
Art, Because You're Real
Way Way Back: Gothenburg, Ne 1987
Way Way Back: Gothenburg, NE 1987
Dana Haugaard
January, 2020
What lives in the quiet moments of remembering that drift in orbits around the longer narrative of our lives? What grows in the fertile tensions between the attraction and repulsion of memory; what we integrate vs. what we discard. What stays liminal and never stabilizes? What small circles do we weave ourselves into, and is there pleasure in those constraints?
I want to hold a space here for the small moments that may seem mundane, easy to discard, but which carry the weight of all their contexts: all the futility of remembering and all of the necessity of it as well. Memories exist, though, now in light of what we hold presently and in light of what we're carrying - socially, politically, interpersonally, ecologically. All memory is to some extent invented, and this experience is no different.
Way Way Back: Gothenburg, NE 1987 is a record of me remembering a moment. It is one of my earliest recollections, set alongside a recording made by my great-great grandfather who is remembering the same day and recording himself remembering way, way back to when he was young. The perforations in the enlarged approximation of the tin can, similar to ones I made when I was young, are a transcription of the sky over Nebraska on January 15th, 1987 when the recording was made.
The fluctuating relationships between our self-awareness, place, and time, and how the act of remembering a memory brings to light perceptions that can be both true and false from moment to moment. By distilling and manipulating sensations in a contained environment, I hope to provoke shifts of perception in the viewer that induce self-reflection and a heightened sense of self-awareness, within and without.