Uchronie Fragments is inspired by memories of a family history so altered by re-telling that it’s morphed into a hypothetical past. What remains is a cross-generational idealism deeply encoded in the artist’s psyche but not entirely his own. His images, yet another iteration of the stories passed down, are nonspecific but familiar enough for us to share his contagious nostalgia.
Mixing notions about multiverses and the malleability of memory, Harruthoonyan approaches the process of image-making like a scientific experiment. The process begins with source images, either personal origin stories recreated for the camera or narratives intuited from found photos and shot again on 4 x 5 film. He then dissects his negatives by hand, removing and reassembling layers of emulsion to test how much information he can modify and still trigger a visceral response with the resulting print.
Without faces and in the void of blackness, the conspicuous figures read as archetypes open to classic Freudian projection and transference. Even stripped down, the scenes are still layered and tactile, rich in pattern and ornamentation. Like powerful recollections from a shared memory bank, this pliable version of events can resonate in many directions but still feel real and intimate. By putting a micro/macro lens on this vast psychological space, Harruthoonyan shows us that there’s a lot to be seen in the absence of light and that multiple realities, especially the most auspicious, can endure.
-Shelley DeSoto