‘American Ghosts’

‘American Ghosts’ is the result of a 7 week research and making process undertaken as artist in residence at the University of Arkansas in Fort Smith, an area steeped in the iconography and history of the American South.

Alex worked with local museums, collections, faculty and craftsmen to explore and re-frame archive materials and documentation of the past, producing a series of collage based multi-media structures and exhibits.

The work used collage as a device to weave together found artefacts and archival materials, capturing and reframing snatches of text and image, ideas and associations, documents and fragments of events. New contexts and narratives are suggested at the resulting intersections, intuiting memory ghosts of past and present. The work offers glimpses of these ghosts as they manifest in archives and collections and explores how they are built into the region, its artefacts, culture and architecture.

Both ‘visibility’ and ‘invisibility’ are considered in this exploration of the making and recording of memory and cultural legacy through collection and archive.

This project is both a ‘graphic topography’ and a ‘visual essay’ – a curated assemblage of graphic artefacts, fragments and visual experiments.

It manifests as a series of visual fragments and artefacts alongside layered multi media ‘collages’ (print, moving image / projection and sound) which both create and intersect with a series of 3D structures to offer up glimpses of the region’s uniquely American ‘compound ghosts’ (TS Eliot), forming an attempt to capture the dichotomy of idealism and progress juxtaposed against the darker undertones and legacy of violence rooted in settler colonization.

The 3D constructions were designed and intended as ‘memory spaces or structures’ – immersive narrative spaces to be walked through, repositories for, and responses to, the found archive materials and visual narratives that reflect, reframe and display the disruptive, multilayered histories and cultural memories of the region.

‘the archive, while historically embedded, is not about the past but about the future of the past.’ (Cook & Schwartz, 2002, 172)