Nick Meek’s ‘Unreliable Memories’ looks back at his fascination with Hollywood constructions of culture and considers how the afterglow of its optimism lingers and morphs in the mind.
In mimicking the conjuring of memory, Meek intuitively turns up the volume on the adaptive and constructive part of the process. In essence, remembering entails a certain amount of forgetting. Meek mines this gap, creating space for all kinds of meaning that might not have been there in the first place. The images then become lodged in a constant dialectic: past/present, proximity/distance, real/unreal. The constant negotiation is inherently bittersweet.
By replaying our borrowed histories in such a vivid light, Meek lends energy to the here and now and makes space to rewrite a more ambitious script for what’s to come. With these quick jumps in time and place, Meek remixes the takes, making a hopeful place to reflect on what’s worth keeping as we transform.
