CHRIS CHELSEA 

ARTIST STATEMENT

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    A large aspect of my work tends to be entirely personal.  As I examine my past, I realize that most of my early life experiences often feel integrated with one another.  I do not have many memories from my childhood and few from my adolescence, partly because I experience loss at such an early age that forgetting was a coping method for me.

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  My work focuses on the ideas of memory, forgetting, and how this affects one’s identity, or rather, leads to a fragmented identity.  

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     By challenging the division between memory and experience, I create personal moments that are created by acceptance and refusal, rules and errors, as means to shift the meaning and where interpretation becomes multifaceted.  I am interested in pushing the boundaries of photography and its materiality, to transcend the representation of photography and to investigate the potential of abstraction.