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.

This series began with a conversation among friends, sparked by the question, “Who is your TV dad?” I became interested in how we build a sense of kinship through shared cultural references — how fictional families and public figures can feel as real and formative as our own.

Each piece begins with a celebrity or public figure commonly associated with a famous family. From that point, I construct a genogram entirely from memory, mapping both real and fictional relationships until no further links can be recalled. Small embroidered portraits mark every individual in the diagram.

Embroidery, a medium historically tied to domestic record-keeping and commemoration, becomes a way to explore the iconography of family and inheritance within popular culture. These works trace the overlap between collective memory and personal association, revealing how cultural narratives shape the ways we understand identity and belonging.

In this series, I draw each of my Facebook friends — an exercise in mapping social connection through remembered information. I begin by writing a list of everything I know about each person, focusing only on facts, not opinions or feelings. That text then becomes the material of the portrait: using their profile picture as a guide, I render each image entirely out of words.

The level of detail in each drawing reflects the depth of my knowledge. The more I know about someone, the denser and more intricate their portrait becomes — yet paradoxically, the harder it is to read. Those I know only in passing appear as faint outlines or partial forms, their images incomplete or dissolving into suggestion.

Through this process, I examine the shifting boundaries between familiarity and distance, data and likeness, public identity and private knowing. The series turns the social network inside out, transforming digital connections into tangible evidence of what we truly know — and what remains unseen.

For this series of prints, I return to the same written descriptions that form the foundation of my larger poster works — my detailed retellings of the films that shaped my childhood. Each piece begins with that same act of remembering: reconstructing a movie from memory, scene by scene, through dialogue, costume, setting, and light.

Here, though, the process takes a different form. Instead of physically removing the surface of a found poster, I work digitally, using the text of my recollection to reveal the image beneath it. The text becomes a mask — the only place where the image is allowed to exist. Through it, alternate versions of the original theatrical posters come into view, filtered once again through the lens of memory.

These prints aren’t reproductions of the full-size poster pieces; they stand on their own as a separate edition — more contained, but no less obsessive in their construction. Each one is an experiment in how memory and language can build an image, not by depicting it directly, but by holding onto what remains.

This series began with a list of 31 daily prompts, which I then used as a search term within my personal music library. When a search produced results - either a song title or an artist’s name - I created a color relief print inspired by it, incorporating lyrics from that song or from the chosen artist’s work. When a search returned nothing, the absence itself became the subject: a printed record of the blank search screen, marking the limits of my collection and, by extension, of my cultural memory.

By translating digital searches into physical prints, the series explores the intersection of language, technology, and personal experience. Each piece becomes a record of an individual archive in dialogue with broader cultural systems — visualizing how information, creativity, and recall interact in both structured and unpredictable ways.

In this series of videos, I record myself performing every line I can remember from a specific film. Each line is spoken as I recall it — from dialogue and pacing to tone and rhythm — based solely on memory. The resulting audio is then layered over the original movie footage.

The completed works exist somewhere between reconstruction and erasure. Sometimes my performance aligns perfectly with the original; other times it drifts, overlaps, or falls away entirely. Only the lines I remember are heard, creating fragments of the film that mirror the gaps and distortions of memory itself.

Through this process, I explore how repetition and recall shape our understanding of what is true — how remembered versions of things can quietly replace the original, becoming our own lived reality.

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.