Lightbox
Architecture of Memory
Artwork by Cheryl Molnar
Curated by Fay Ku
The fictional landscapes depicted Cheryl's collages are inspired by places she been, but re-imagined into exaggerated environments exploring the tension between human progress and nature. She grew up in suburban Long Island where natural landscapes were raised to make way for prefabricated housing developments, strip malls, and industrial parks. She saw similarities in Greenpoint Brooklyn where she lived for 18 years watching new construction brought on by gentrification chip away at the quaintness and character of the original architecture.Her process begins with documentation: She photographs locations traveled as well as her everyday surroundings such as Long Island and her Grandmother’s house in LA. These photographs are digitally stitched together, combining landscapes with structures from various “memories.” This is the way we experience memories: we confuse the place and time and structures bleed together. We patch places together in our minds the way she collages photographs. These are the improbable landscapes of our memory, given physical shape.