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Dana Sterling’s Photographs From ‘Cache Memory’ Recreate Her Personal History

Art reviews · July 5, 2016

Dana Sterling Photograph Bird Trapped Net

Ladder Outside Window

Flat Rotten Banana

Man Looking Over Wall

Blue Brick Wall

Rushes Lake Shore

Woman Sleeping Bed

Dana Sterling‘s photographs from ‘Cache Memory’ seek to create a personal history, a series of pictures that somehow reveal the truth of the artist while not being of the artist. In short they are a fabrication, an effort to build a visual history that reflects her uncertain life as an immigrant in Israel; a young girl born to English parents and living in the Middle East. In a world of violence and political extremism. This dichotomy between a tranquil English background and a explosive – sometimes literally – reality in Israel is what gives these photographs their resonance, their title. Cache memory. As Sterling articulates so well:

I’m researching a history that I don’t see as actually mine; Family memories that I am not part of. The images become objects that I use in order to create a new history and memory of my own; people and places as I would like to remember and understand them. I started not only looking for my identity in the old photos but also reflect my feelings from these photos on to the world around me.

I look for moments and objects were there is a tension that is created by their incomplete aesthetic. Photography allows me to look at the little and unimportant objects around me and make them a part of my history just by giving them attention. By looking at them I capture them to remember, not letting them go away, yet not trying to save them. Watching their last seconds before I leave and the moment becomes irrelevant, capturing their last breath. With my camera I grant them with eternity and in that I grant myself a memory.

Like Sterling I grew up in a place that was alien to my family history, an Irish boy on a South Pacific island. However, the south seas are a far cry from the Middle Est and my problem has always been the opposite to Sterling’s. I never fit into Ireland. I always wanted to go back to my little island. Having said that we both sit on the fence, we both remain outsiders in a world that increasingly dismisses those that don’t belong, fit in. A time in which conservatism, radicalism and the far right are on the march. It’s a frightening moment in history and one that makes this series so relevant. Here’s what she has to say about the project:

My family roots back to England, but I was born in Israel. I was a child on a fence; a daughter to a migrating family. The house within culturally stayed European but outside was the Israeli controversial culture. I always felt a misfit with my partial incomplete identity; torn apart between parents who have never blended in to the Middle Eastern culture I felt only half belonged too.

Due to the migration of my family from England to Israel that history discontinued, and therefore I find it hard do consider it as mine. In order to regain my history I’ve appropriated images, along with ones that I have made myself, and edited them into a book titled ‘cache memory’. The statement that represents the book is the definition of its title – cache memory. The decision to name the book and present it through this definition is handed down as recognition of what is hidden in photographs, coded and read through context; that photographs can unfold memories but not necessarily the same ones that were originally embedded in them.

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Filed Under: Art reviews Tagged With: Photography

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