Unthought Known is a multimedia photographic series that investigates the psychological and corporeal lived experiences of traumatic memory. Within the framework of affect theory, memory studies, and psychoanalysis, I focus on the ways in which the encounter with these traces of trauma creates a dissociated and disembodied experience of the self, time, and space. Due to trauma’s inherent unrepresentability and inseparability with the body, I build spaces with translucent materials, light, shadow, and the body in various states of dissolution in order to elicit the perceptual, psychological, and physiological experience of traumatic memory.

Trauma takes the form of a shadow that disrupts the linearity of time through moments of repetition, interruption, and delay. The video installation, titled Perpetual Absence, addresses the mind’s attempt to reconstruct isolated fragments from traumatic memories, only to be subjected to fabrication. With projected video onto a physical print, the hybridity of the mediums places the viewer into a space of paradox between stasis and motion, fixed and temporal, veracity and falsehood. In relation to the video and project as a whole, the installation of smaller photographic prints, titled Fragment, varies in scale and placement in order to reflect the fragmented and inconsistent narrative of traumatic memory. I find the perceptual experience of the video and photographic installation reflective of the experience of trauma itself, a disrupted conflation of the past and present and fact and fiction.