In this ongoing project, I am attempting to record all of the factual knowledge that resides in my own memory. I record the information directly from memory without the aid of any reference materials. The information is then classified and recorded into the corresponding category book(s).
When I was a child, I had a collection of VHS tapes that I would watch on rotation. It was an eclectic group - ranging from The Karate Kid and The Labyrinth to Beverly Hills Cop and Fried Green Tomatoes. Some were introduced to me by my older brothers, and others I discovered on my own - but all of them became mine.
In this series, I begin with a meticulous recounting of each film from memory - from dialogue and plot, to costume and setting, even editing and cinematography - including as much detail as I can remember. I want the viewer to see it with me.
Using this text, I transform found theatrical posters into fragmented reflections of the original images, filtered through my own memory. Through labor-intensive scratching, the top layer of ink and glossy finish is carefully stripped away, leaving behind only the areas with the text of my descriptive recounting.
The resulting work invites viewers to reflect and compare their own experience of remembrance. For each piece, the text is scaled to fill the entire poster. The density of the text in each piece becomes a visual testament of my memory of each film, while gaps and voids reflect uncertainty or the fading of memory over time.
This series is more than an homage to the films that shaped my childhood; it's a testament to the enduring power of storytelling to transcend time and space, weaving together the threads of our collective consciousness in a tapestry of shared experiences.
Each piece in this series begins with a celebrity commonly associated as being part of a famous family. From the starting point, I draw a family tree of that person, including both real and fictional familial relationships. This genogram is drawn completely from my memory and ends when I can think of no more relationships.
This series is based on my facebook friends. I am in the process of creating a drawing of each of my over 600 friends on facebook. Each drawing is based on their profile pictures, and consists solely of text. The text is all the information that I know about that person.
In this series, I start by writing a description of what happens in the movie from memory, including as much detail as I can remember (plot, costume, setting, characters etc). Then the text is laid over the movie’s theatrical poster, so that the poster is only seen through the text of the description.
This series was created from prompts from Jake Parker's 2017 Inktober Instagram challenge. But instead of ink drawings, I decided to make relief prints. I took the prompt and fed it into the search bar of my music library, making a woodcut each day based on the results of the query (either artist or song title). Terms that yielded no results are represented by an inkjet print.
In this series of videos, I have recorded myself performing every line that I know from memory for a particular movie. Each line is performed based on my recollection of how the line exists in the movie, including the dialogue, pacing, etc. The resulting audio is then superimposed over the original video from the movie.
2012-2014
Duration: 37 minutes, 53 seconds
Caroline Burghardt + Amanda Tiller present a mash-up collage musical sing-a-long movie, the narrative of which is drawn from six classic Disney romances. The original songs have been replaced with iconic 80s(ish) ballads. This video performance is an examination of the structures and paradigms that shaped our childhood ideals of love.
