Monica J. Brown

Your Position Once Fixed
acrylic on canvas
40 x 30 in.

What does it mean to remember? Memory is the fabric of life experience. Our autobiographical memories are the stories that we tell ourselves about ourselves. Though life events may be experienced with others, memory is a solo journey, as it a reproduction of events filtered through personal perception and an interpretation of past experiences. Beyond nostalgia, memory holds an essence of our awareness of ourselves. It is a template for how we perceive relationships, and informs our interactions inside them. Memory is an abstraction. It holds our entire history, but how much of that is our “real” story? And what stories do we tell ourselves about this story? Which stories do we own and which ones own us? And how do we break free of those that don’t serve our greatest good? And which ones are there for us to uncover/ recover/ discover for the healing our ancestors/ progeny/ selves?

© Monica J. Brown