"Bug Brain (when I think about the love that I thought would save me)" 2013
Velveeta Heartbreak
Brooklyn, USA
64" (162.5cm) x 48" (123cm), graphite and gouache on paper
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In greek mythology, the goddess of memory was the mother of all art, poetry, and song. In the digital age, a massive collective memory is being built in rare earth metals and silicon chips. Memory is the faculty of the brain by which our experience is encoded, stored, and retrieved, when needed. But what happens when memories take over our brain? There's a party in my mind...
In this visual essay on memory, and more specifically, on how memory can metastasize into the torment of mental illness, we see many references. An elephant’s brain rises from its skull, travelling through a diamond. In twentieth century culture, the elephant is a creature who ‘never forgets’. There are stories of elephants visiting the bones of their dead ancestors. Like an ‘elephant’s memory’, a ‘diamond is forever’. When a certain memory refuses to die, we say it is ‘bugging us’. The well known flower ‘forget-me-not’ prefers a moist environment, like the brain. A stand of forget-me-nots sprouts from the head of a rock drummer, who looks a bit like a character from the Ugly Stickers. Edgar Allen Poe's raven has joined the party, as he quoth “nevermore” astride the fallen head of the palladium, her brains shat on the ground in front of her. Meanwhile, on the other side of the brain, a so-called ‘rock star’ has fallen from the sky, into a suburban home, where he is trapped by the ‘internet of things’, his arachnoid face at home in the web. There is even a retinal memory of his laughing lover, backwards and upside down.
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