Monika Traikov
Monika Traikov Explains Her Work to EIL
“The works explore the illusion of memories and nostalgia, reflecting a constant yearning for the past, often in an idealized or distorted form. The way we remember moments are often glossed over, or warped in a beautiful way. Often, feelings, colours and emotions are remembered more than the tangible. I used my personal experiences with memories to deconstruct my old family photographs, and create a new, idealized, and illusionary moments. Each image evokes a certain mood and emotion encased in a memory- whether it is an eerie memory that you can’t quite put back together, or a dreamy, fantastical memory that you will never forget. The series tells a fragmented story of different emotions, moods, and moments that translates these foreign family photographs into something familiar and thought provoking. I wanted to establish a familiarity in each image, allowing viewers to extract their own personal meaning and be able to relate them to their own memories and past.
The photographs are scanned into the computer digitally, and are changed through stretching, pixelating, shifting, or layering. Using a digital medium contrasts the organic elements of the photographs by adding structure, organization and a more methodological element to the images. The post processing helps to unify the essence of past and present.
The fragmented qualities of the images mimic the constructive and illusionary processes that our minds use in remembering a specific moment of our past. The images weave together both truth (the tangible photographs) and illusions (the distortions and fragments) to create a sense of uncanny memory.”
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