DAISY PATTON | Project Space Exhibition

This excerpt from "Forgetting is so long" is part of a new exploration into women and female relationships, which Daisy Patton defines broadly and inclusively; "I am interested in poses that mirror each other, a different form of connection across space and time." This series takes abandoned or discarded family photographs that are enlarged to life-size as archival prints and then painted over with oils. "I paint to disrupt, to reimagine, to re-enliven these individuals," says Patton.  Family photographs are sacred relics to their loved ones, but unmoored the images become hauntingly absent.

Anthropologist Michael Taussig states that defacing these types of objects forces a “shock into being;” suddenly we perceive them as present, revered, and piercing. By mixing painting with photography, Daisy lengthens Roland Barthes’ “moment of death” (the photograph) into a loving act of remembrance yet also a form of purgatory. Not alive but not quite dead, each person’s newly imagined and altered portrait straddles the lines between memory, identity, and death. They are monuments to the forgotten.