Menagerie

Menagerie was my senior exhibition at Boise State University to complete a Visual Art BFA with a Photography Emphasis. I printed over (150) 5”x7” photos taken from 35mm film and strung them up on a 7’x12’ section of wall. See my artist statement and pictures of the installation below.

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Menagerie

Katy Rogan

2016

My whole life I have had trouble with my focus and being able to stay in the moment. It can take a lot of energy to ground my thoughts into the present, so I have taken to documenting my life. When we experience things it can be difficult to tell what memories are going to stick with us for years to come. In this body of work I use color 35mm film to capture memory on a spectrum of clarity and hyper pigmentation. This not only documents my experiences but it together it creates a colorful patchwork that from a far stands as a large snapshot into my brain. I chose to print them at 5x7” to give them the tangible feeling of photos in a memory box. The accidental light leaks throughout the rolls perfectly obscure photos that hold an especially personal significance to me, representing the distortion and repression of memory.

From a place I used to call home in a neighborhood I don’t go to anymore, to a person I no longer call; these combined with more recent captures of impaired rides home, familiar treetops, and the mundanity of the day to day begin a menagerie of the human experience that happens to be mine. Nobody’s memories look exactly the same; they are from different angles and are hard to read sometimes. But we can draw similarities to human experiences as well as differences, which I hope leads to a better understanding of each other.