Melanie dai Medeiros elaborates on the dissonance between reality and perceived reality in her pursuit of individual and collective memories. Memories, like our environment, are layered, fluid, and accumulative. Perceptions of memories as those of our environment can be transparent or opaque depending on the moment. Both are in a constant state of flux in visual affinity with the variable nature of paper sculpture’s malleable nature and shifting presentation. This body of work began as an introspection into the jumble of disparate images that constitute Medeiros’ own childhood memories. Realizing her own follies in her efforts to reflect an ideal of truth as it relates to her own past, she began to seek the memories contained within a particular place of her own past to narrate her story using her community to construct the story of the land through found objects and shared narratives. Examining her own memories exposed a duplicity of consciousness – juxtaposing the known with the felt. These works are documents. Each one contains the parallel perspectives of both of these ways of understanding her memories, collected and interpreted within the fibers of paper.

• Much Like Real Life: MFA Low-Residency 2020 Alumni