ROOMS

Rooms is a new series in the memory palace I am building—an evolving architectural space I visualize to organize and recall information. Each painting in this series functions as a floor plan of a single room in which I place multiple memories associated with that space in my palace. The titles deliberately suggest ideal or nostalgic spaces: Boudoir invokes a bygone era of private dressing rooms with their trappings of sensuality and intimacy; Dollhouse, a trope of girl childhood, suggests idealized domestic bliss; and Root Cellar, an obsolete room once used to store food supplies underground, implies a desire for a historical past. To counteract the idealized and universal connotations of these spaces, the paintings include stains of my personal memories. They are layered with people, events, and emotions—a condensed record of my past. While the building of my palace has enabled me to revisit memories, it has also allowed new interpretations of the data; a memory is altered each time it is retrieved, as it is always recalled through a new filter.