Jon Malis, Washington, D.C.

Specimen 66, 2011

digital photographic print on Dibond

30 x 42 inches

Jon Malis, Artist’s Statement

I'm obsessed with memory and its interpretations. What we remember and how we remember it. How our memories are shaped to remember the "truth" and history as we've idealized it, not as it originally transpired. How we shape our lives around imperfect memories. How memories and experiences are documented, shared and communicated to strangers.

Investigating both my personal relationship with memories, as well as publically shared memories, my work ranges from re-representations of personal thoughts and moments to investigations of the ability of documents to change their meaning throughout their existence.

My reMind series steps outside the personal context of my own memories, examining an archive of 100-year-old scientific slides of the human brain. Much like memory itself, these documents have suffered from the ails of time - evolving from what was once a perfect reproduction of precise scientific accuracy to a form harboring ambiguous interpretations, readings and recollections.