Tracy L Chandler - A Poor Sort of Memory
As part of its new series of exhibition, Deadbeat Club is pleased to present A POOR
SORT OF MEMORY, an exhibition of photography works by TRACY L CHANDLER.
Installed in a now-defunct home design studio, Tracy L Chandler’s A Poor Sort of
Memory exhibition and its delicate hues of the Californian desert embodies the artist
chore themes of reminiscence and personal investigation, of memory and transformation, of loss and recreation
For this body of work, Tracy L Chandler went back to her hometown in the California
desert—and not without ambivalence. “As I revisited old hideouts in concrete washes and private bunks in rock formations, I was reminded of a past laden with trauma
and my desperation to find both a sense of belonging and an independent self,” she
says. The explorations of her youth had been a means to escape the morbid chaos
of her family home and find refuge in the peripheries.
And so, in these pictures there is a palpable contrast between the serenity of the
minimalist landscape and the artist’s unshakeable feelings of claustrophobia and
alienation. As she re-navigated this terrain, she faced the dilemma of reconciling the
objective reality before her with the subjective truths of her memories: “I struggled
to parse memory from fantasy and reflection from projection.” Rather than shy away
from this ambiguity, Chandler embraced the role of unreliable narrator, using the
remnants of her history to craft a new photographic fiction.
