Connecting the dots

NOLAN TREDWAY’S MEMORY GARDEN

Memory Garde

“IT is in darkness we are anonymous among waves and it is in discordance our story begins.” These words, spoken by Nolan Tredway, multimedia artist and co-director of Tugboat Gallery in Lincoln, Nebraska, commence his short but all-encompassing video work called Memory Garden.

At a little over four minutes, Tredway manages to condense the cycle of existence — from seeming nothingness to creation and, finally, dissolution — using the form of a man as his primary subject. Along the way, we see a visual representation of lights in space coalescing into a grid of connected points, taking shape first as a spectral field that appears cosmic, like a constellation of stars, on the one hand; and infinitesimal, like a depiction of energy on a quantum level on the other. One suspects that the series of interconnected points of light, which start to take on the appearance of illuminated synapses and eventually resemble human shapes and forms, exist simultaneously on a large scale and small scale. “It’s a little bit about how we function on a micro and macro level,” Tredway said about the video.

Slowly, the vision of the man, who is Tredway himself, grows more distinct and more human. The video monologue, a voiceover that tells a tale of an act of creation with the use of metaphors, synchs up to the movements of his lips — the word made flesh, so to speak. The monologue ends and begins the video as a disembodied voice, spoken through the figure who acts as its vessel only for a short while in between. As if to make that aspect more plain, the words never really seem to come from the figure itself, who appears to mouth them as though he is lip-synching. In a way, it is lip-synching, since the recorded voice was added separately.

Tredway made Memory Garden, which can be regarded as a somewhat impersonal self-portrait, using photogrammetry, scanning photographs of his own face, from which he then created a 3D digital model to animate. “Moving yourself around and animating yourself, as a process, is really kind of disturbing, in the same way that hearing your own voice is a little bit odd,” he said. “Seeing your own body and having to bring it to life — it’s surreal to do it, as well as to watch as the final product. My mom just told me she didn’t even recognize me as me the first time she watched it.”

“Where do we define the word ‘I’ and the word ‘self’ and where does it exist? At some marker between micro and macro?” — artist Nolan Tredway

After a few moments, the figure becomes overgrown with flowering ivy, reaching, perhaps, a penultimate state of sentient being or abundant life before succumbing to inevitable degradation, the skin growing splotchy, the eyes sinking and eventually releasing a gaseous dark smoke. The figure itself returns once more to the state from which it began: as floating points of light in space. Whether the figure exists now on the boundless scale of the universal, the realm of subatomic particles, or both, always remains an open question — an inexplicable state of mystery. We are left to wonder if, in the darkness beyond time, “among the waves,” we both are and are not. “Where do we define the word ‘I’ and the word ‘self’ and where does that exist?” he asked. “At some marker between micro and macro? I’m kind of playing around with the idea of scale and where we decide to settle on that scale. That’s where we find that marker.” — M.A.