David Wesley White
The Living Room
This installation, titled The Living Room, uses reconfigured objects gathered from my childhood home in West Boylston, Massachusetts. There is an inherent problem with memory. The human mind selectively casts memories into hierarchies. Some memories far outweigh others in importance. This casting system allows fragments of the past to influence our present action. Memories lie, symbols rearrange themselves, and meanings shift. If we try to preserve the fragments of our past in the same form in which we received them, we will be left empty—stacked with belongings, keepsakes, and ideas of what was or could have been. If we can take hold of these fragments—twist, reverse, or reenact them—we stand a better chance of uncovering our true selves, within a convoluted, miscommunicated, surface-level reality. See the video here.