Official Memories – Apollo Moon Landing Sequence, Mixed Media, 2020

Please form an orderly queue to receive your officially licensed memories of this event, just as you would have recalled them yourself. Your officially Licensed memories will be handed to you as you exit, please only take one set of memories to avoid confusion.

The Official Memories series explores commercially produced tourist slides, examining through them the messages and images the place wanted you to take back home with you. They serve as the records of the memories you were meant to have of your trip, but were they the ones you actually had? How much do they tell us about how a place sees itself, and the self it wishes to project onto others? Onto these slides are stuck butterflies – partly obscuring the official images, the butterfly wings becoming part of the projection, light streaming through the wings and imposing pattern on the image. They represent an inconvenient truth, an element of reality juxtaposed against the flat slide.

The Apollo Moon Landing Sequence takes this to extremes. Here, produced for you ready to purchase are tourist slides of from the Moon. Here are presented to you your memories of the place you’ve never been and can never go to. With these slides, you can sit in the dark and project onto your wall images of a dream made real that for you must always remain a dream. The butterflies make this a dark, distorted image. What have we pinned to these dreams?