“Connections”
Silkscreen and acrylic on paper
Toni Dachis

We as human beings often need to define our place in the world. This starts from the time we are born. Our connections and relationships with our family help us to determine who we will become and start us on our path to the future.

The internet and social networks have made sharing photos instant and oversaturated. Technology has made it easy to capture hundreds of photos with a digital camera and simply delete the ones you do not want, but when was the last time you looked through old family photos from an album where you could touch the paper, see the cracks and imagine life from a single photo? It is at that moment you realize you have lost track of time while witnessing time pass through photos.

In this series, my goal is to have the viewer make the connection between the divided and repeated photos, as if putting together one’s history. I used mostly childhood photos because that is when many of our family values, relationships and personalities are formed. I displayed each page without borders to suggest the feeling of a family album.

The last piece in the series was made from all the scraps of the original prints and arranged to make the connections less apparent then in the previous pieces. This piece represents someone with Alzheimer's. Alzheimer's disease would make the connections of the past, at times impossible.


September 10, 2010