Archive of Absence
Deborah Orloff's solo exhibition will include work from several series that fall under the overarching title Elusive Memory, a large body of work in progress since 2013. Her new series, Elusive Memory: Constructed Histories, is a collage project. In these intimate assemblages, she juxtaposes physically altered family photos with images made in European locations relevant to her ancestry and Jewish history including the Holocaust. Conflating time, people, and places, these pieces start to suggest stories and relationships that could have transpired but, like her family history, can never be fully known. Orloff initially embarked on a three-month European odyssey to make source material for the collage project. However, while photographing concentration camps and other sites related to her Jewish heritage, she was struck by spaces that had traumatic histories but little to no visual evidence of what took place at there. Thinking about this erasure of history, she photographed a number of such places and started a parallel body of work, Elusive Memory: What Remains. Prints from this series will be included in the exhibition as well.
