Nick Meek - Unreliable Memories - Part 2
The gallery is pleased to present a second selection of images taken from Nick Meek’s award-winning publication – Unreliable Memories. All the images in the series were created between 2002-2017, but where our first presentation focused only on the landscapes of the USA, a country which provided much of the visual and iconographic inspiration for the project, this second collection features imagery from Nick’s travels to the four corners of the world, from Japan to South America, Europe to South-East Asia.
Soaked in colour and deliberate in its staging, Nick Meek’s aesthetic is a key to unlocking the collective psyche. Accessed through imagination and leading to a fiction of reality, this collective psyche is the space where meanings that might have never been there in the first place are created, opening to a profound questioning of the effects of memory in the way we perceive not only what surrounds us, but also ourselves. In the process of forgetting to remember, a visual mythology arises.
Simultaneously hazy and hyperreal, the images allow the viewer to immerse themselves in the gaze of the photographer, the photographs become landscape in itself. Far from being descriptive, they tear the surface of what we believe the places ought to be, their own representation, delving into the space for re-imagining. The tension that arises is the dialectic between past and present, proximity and distance, real and unreal. The series works as a device for thinking about those places we thought we knew.
“Unreliable Memories upholds this imperfect creative quality of our memories at a time when technology offers us the possibility to register every single moment of our lives with clinical precision” – Borja Bagunyà