[[[pull_quote]]]

"What does it mean that I’ve known something to be true?" asks Augusta Wood. The elusiveness of memory is vital for this L.A.-based artist, who operates in the region where personal recollection, photographic evidence, and architecture overlap. Part of her most recent series, "i have only what i remember," will be included in the group show "Eight Emerging Photographers from Southern California," on view at Fred Torres Collaborations, in New York, from March 10 through April 9. The work involves elaborate rephotographings of archival slides capturing her family’s past. Wood is interested not only in the slipperiness of memory but also in how our missteps and errors of recollection align with architecture — such as the house of her maternal grandparents, where the series was shot.

After both her grandparents died, their house, in Binghamton, New York, sat empty for several years. Wood spent a month alone there, with no furnishings, she recalls, save for "the telephones and the answering machine." She used the blank structural space as a screen on which to literally project discrete moments from previous decades: photos of herself as a child, playing the piano, and of her mother, in 1966, conversing in the living room with a now-forgotten friend. Each image combines multiple slides, representing a cross-section of years referred to in Wood’s titles — for example, Downstairs (1985, 1991, 1999, 2008), 2009. From an aesthetic standpoint, the photographs owe a debt to the camera obscura works of Abelardo Morrell. But whereas Morrell takes the outside world and projects it atop an interior space, Wood resurrects personal photographic histories and arranges them on the actual site where those histories unfolded.

View Slideshow: This Old House

Wood followed a circuitous path to arrive at this point. As a student at Cooper Union, in New York, she experimented with various media before settling on photography. After graduation she completed a series of black-and- white images, "Preparing For," which documented the coldly sterile equipment in a morgue. She pursued graduate studies at CalArts, whose "cerebral, theoretical" culture, she admits, didn’t always jibe with her intuitive working methods. A post-MFA series of text- based photographs placed phrases culled from novels, personal writings, and conversations within pictures. "It was born out of thinking and talking about art and the relationship between language and imagery," Wood says. "I decided to go about trying to marry the two, collapse them into the same visual space." The words were inscribed in sand or snow, traced in syrup, or handwritten on papers that are sometimes easy to miss within the photo. In some instances a fragment of text would trigger a memory of a location that had personal resonance, and she’d plan a photograph of the phrase within that locale. "I was interested in the nuance of memory and how we remember places versus how they really are when we revisit them," she says.

Although the resulting image was paramount, Wood thought of her text pieces as "interventions" in space. "I was thinking about layers, double exposures. ‘What else can I put into a scene that plays a similar role to the text?’" All these ruminations led to Wood’s sleeping on the floor of her grandparents cleaned-out house, projecting slides of things that had once occupied it but were no longer physically there. The final picture is Wood’s, but it’s built from other photographs, some with unknown provenances. "There’s a sense of shared or collaborative vision that I’m drawing on to create my own layered version of this particular space," Wood says.

Her grandparents owned a great deal of art, and images of key works survive within the slide projections, allowing a Francis Bacon or Andy Warhol to once again hang on the walls, if only in a virtual sense. (They had a good eye, as evidenced by one photo that features pieces by Pablo Picasso, Robert Rauschenberg, Alexander Calder, and Juan Miró.)

"There’s an undulation between the physicality of the empty architecture and the images projected on it," Wood explains. "How much does it look like a projection? How much is it integrated enough that you question whether something is actually in the space or not?" The effect is ghostly, minus any morbid undertones: The house might be saturated with the past, but it’s not haunted. And in a way, the images and artwork projected on the walls are as important as the human actors caught in the family snapshots.

Wood has tentative plans to expand the project into book form, which might also involve documenting the "genealogy" of the artworks once owned by her grandparents, whether they’ve been sold to strangers or given to relatives. Perhaps "i have only what i remember" is a subconscious continuation of her early project on morgues and its focus on "what happens when you die, what happens to your body." Personal photographs and the art people chose to collect transcend their original owners. They have a way of beating death. They’re what survive.

"Intoducing: Augusta Wood" originally appeared in the February 2011 issue of Modern Painters. For a complete list of articles from this issue available on ARTINFO, see Modern Painters' February 2011 Table of Contents.