- City
- Toronto
- Booth
- Nathan Phillips Square
Booth 1-2
Haley Meyer
My paintings explore the relationship between transitional places and memory loss, using fleeting images taken while in transit to reflect how memories slip, fade, and blur over time. Drawing from my experience with memory loss, I see these places as impermanent and distorted, mirroring the way memory loss fractures and reshapes past experiences.
Sourcing reference material from the passenger seat of my car at night, I use my digital camera to spontaneously photograph the passing world. I focus on the car in motion, discovering how the world is transformed through movement. The flashes of artificial lights from stoplights, storefronts, and shifting landscapes reflect the instability of memory; moments that dissolve before they can be fully grasped. Painting artificial lights against dark spaces, I create an uncertain atmosphere marked by the urge to remember moments that would otherwise be forgotten. Centered in the interior of the car often looking outwards, I see the passing world as an intangible entity; visible but unreachable through the glass, paralleling my difficulties with recollection.
Painting from photographs allows me to organize, preserve, and remember fading experiences. The slowness of rendering a painting extends the time spent with a fleeting image, turning vague memories into physical objects on canvas. In turn, painting has become an active resistance to my memory loss, allowing me to remember my everyday experiences through preservation and reconstruction.
One of the challenges of living with memory loss is how the mind weaves together different moments into a singular nonlinear recollection. The images I’ve painted, sourced from different days, can be strung together to create the illusion of a singular journey where memories intertwine and blur the boundaries between past and present.
