V.C.'s Artist Statement

Artist Statement The Archive Series
During my childhood I was very attentive to ‘making memory’. I often reordered family
photo albums, wrote journal entries so as to not forget events, and recruited family members
in making occasions memorable according to my eight-year-old standards. I now believe
that these childhood obsessions of mine were in response to living with a heightened
awareness of mortality. When I was six my father was diagnosed with cancer. When I was
ten he died. During the four years between his diagnosis and his death I became increasingly
sensitive of what it would mean for someone to be gone. My acts of ‘making memory’ were
to thwart that oncoming and permanent absence.
Although I reordered photographs and created extra photo albums as a child I ignored my
father’s archive of his professional work. My farther was an FBI agent and he kept
newspaper clippings of his cases, memos from agents, official letters, mug shots, and
photographs of his arrests. While the photo albums from my childhood showed a man
whom I know to be my father, this archive creates a portrait of him that I don’t recognize.
Since an FBI agent’s career is often secretive, I only know the most superficial things about
his work. Therefore, researching and examining his archive raises questions instead of
providing answers. While many of these questions are specific to my father (Why keep the
mug shots of people arrested? Did he feel an ethical responsibility toward his power to
arrest people?), other questions reflect my deeper concerns about how we know the past and
how we relate to history. What can we really know about the past? Why are we drawn to
the stories of history? What does our search for the past say about our own lives? While my
artwork is about a search for a father, it also demonstrates the vulnerable and fragmentary
process of looking for a past that is mute and elusive.