NYAB Event - Skye Parrott "First Love, Last Rites"

Skye Parrott "First Love, Last Rites"

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Having grown up with a photographer mother, Parrott’s life had been thoroughly documented until her adolescence, and then again by herself starting at seventeen. But the turbulent period in between was a void in terms of visual record. Following the demise of two key relationships, one with her first love, a boy named Alex, and then of their mutual relationship with drugs, they both went off to rehab and soon after she began taking photographs. From that brief era, she was left only with some vivid memories of particular moments. First Love, Last Rites turns around about a year and a half of her life, beginning when she was fifteen. For this work Parrott asked friend (and sometimes collaborator) Valentine Fillol-Cordier to play her, and with her old clothes and the other people who figured into these memories, she set out to recreate her recollections from these previously undocumented years.

Central to this body of work is Parrott’s interest in the subjectivity of memory. “People choose a few things to remember and those memories become representative of entire relationships or events. In doing this work, I was keenly aware that what I remembered might not be ‘real.’ Curious to explore what had actually happened, after making the photographs I interviewed Alex to find out what he remembered. There was a lot of overlap, but there were huge discrepancies too. There were incidents I thought of as key but that he had forgotten entirely but remembered when I mentioned them and vice versa. And there were places where our stories just completely diverged. I think it points to the way that memories form us, and as we form, we reshape them to fit.” This is sometimes reflected in the exhibition: a detail that she mentions in her text is intentionally different in the corresponding photograph. A scene that takes place at night is shot during the day, or a gesture is reconfigured. In this way, Parrott explores the notion that memory, and even experience, is not “true.” Rather it is something in between truth and fantasy because it goes through the filter of who we are.