James Robert Durant
Artist Statement:
If the past is only ever remembered in the present then it would be fair to say that memory, although concerned with the past, belongs to the present. It is this paradoxical idea which lies at the heart of James Robert Durant’s paintings. His exploration of the meaning of memory consists of integrating his own personal images and references along with anonymous found images in order to blur the line between the private and the public, as well as, past and present. All memories regardless of how personal they might be are interwoven into a larger social fabric, meaning that the act of remembering one’s past is far from a solitary exercise but is instead linked to a larger communal context.
Just as photographs are fictional representations of the past so too are memories a reconstruction of one’s past, likewise, part of Durant’s technique involves distressing the surface of his paintings in order to create an aged and weathered appearance suggestive of the passage of time and the forgetting of things past. By creating this illusion of the passage of time, where the personal becomes foreign and the anonymous becomes familiar Durant reminds us that all memory is essentially a re-remembering and therefore a recreation of the past.
