art of archive

Modern memory is first of all archival. It relies entirely on the specificity of the trace, the materiality of the vestige, the concreteness of the recording, the visibility of the image. 

The process that began with writing has reached its culmination in high fidelity recording. The less memory is experienced from within, the greater its need for external props and tangible reminders of that which no longer exists except qua memory - hence the obsession with the archive that marks an age and in which we attempt to preserve not only all of the past, but all of the present as well. 

Memory has begun to keep records: delegating the responsibility for remembering to the archive.

– Pierre Nora, “Realms of Memory”

Suspension is an ongoing project questioning the interaction between the modern archive of collective and individual memory.

Using rotoscopes drawn with charcoal on redundant suspension files, Dawes references and compares public memories like September 11 with memories from her private archive, like a child jumping on a trampoline. Owing a debt to South African artist William Kentridge’s work in animation, Dawes uses the dialectic of stillness and movement as a technique to present memory not as an inanimate, static concept, or perfect replication, but a flawed and continually active space. 

Despite the ability of this website to exist as it’s own entity, the work is intended to be seen together in both digital and analogue form. As media theorist, Wolfgang Ernst said, “In a digital culture of apparent, virtual, immaterial realities, a reminder of the insistence and resistance of material worlds is indispensable.”

The drawings are scheduled to be exhibited at the ANU School of Art & Design Gallery in mid-2022.