Conflated Mountains

Conflated Mountains (2012–2015) explores the relationship between memory, place, and time by transforming these abstract ideas into visual forms. Initially working with nostalgic travel slides, the challenge of sentimentality shifted the focus to recurring mountain imagery—both as literal landmarks and metaphorical milestones. Inspired by the concept of quilts as collages of stories, the project evolved into creating three-dimensional topographies using Google SketchUp. These minimal black-and-white compositions, built through systems of lines and perspectives, strip away nostalgia, allowing new forms to emerge at the intersection of memory, imagination, and place.

Conflated Mountains is a vessel for my explorations of memory, place, and time. In the process of developing this project, the creation of visual forms transforms these three abstract topics into something concrete and viable.

The exploration began as an investigation into the relationship between memory and the cultural degradation of place. I believe recollection is more an imaginative act and reconstruction at the moment than simply drawing from a stockpile of memories. Andrew Moore’s photography inspired me in Detroit Disassembled, which documents a once-flourishing city in ruin. His photographs elicit a feeling of loss and nostalgia for a forgotten region and bygone era. Moore intentionally excludes images of a once-prospering Detroit and the stages of its decay, allowing the viewer to fill in the gaps and imagine a thriving city and its subsequent demise.

Moore’s photography encouraged me to shift focus from the prolonged deterioration of place to the conflation of memories. Using other people’s photographic slides of travel as a catalyst, I explored how viewing these images could create a new construct: a convergence of the images shown, the viewer’s past experiences, and the viewer’s imagination. However, collecting and curating the slides introduced a complication—the slides were overshadowed by sentimentality. Several factors, from the equipment's technology to the period's fashion, made it impossible to eliminate this inherent nostalgia. Concurring with Terrence Malick’s observation that “nostalgia is a powerful feeling; it can drown out anything,” I sought an alternative approach.

A solution emerged through two inspirations. The first was to simplify and distinguish a theme within the archive. The slides I acquired provided tangible evidence that the photographers intended to remember, save, and share their experiences. By capturing these travel images, they said, in essence, “This is a landmark, a divergence from normality, and I will preserve it.” A recurring motif throughout the collection was mountainscapes, which, in a physical sense, represent distinctive terrains and, in a metaphorical sense, symbolize significant life milestones. The second inspiration was to discover an analogy for communicating memories' convergence. Looking at old family quilts, I became intrigued by the collage concept—taking a collection of old scraps, each with its history, and sewing them together to form a new narrative.

These inspirations led me to explore three-dimensional topography: a unified arrangement of mountains and thread-like lines, eliminating the overwhelming nostalgia. I began creating new systems by mapping prominent terrains in Google SketchUp, controlling the land area, spacing the lines, dividing the mountains into sections, and distributing the terrain. To document these potential conflated views, I used a series of motion paths to track scale, perspective, and composition changes. Removing the emotive embellishments inherent in photography, such as color and mood, reduced the images to minimal compositions of black lines against whitespace. While it might seem that further systematizing the distribution of mountains and camera views would depersonalize the forms, the convergence of these elements resulted in works that felt more personal and evocative than detached and banal.