Molly Corey
Los Angeles artist Molly Corey created visual work for Inch Aeons by Nuala Archer.
H-Bomb, The Family of Man Project
Photograph, 2006
My art-making practice has been predominantly guided by history: art history, social history, political history and personal history. I have come to realize that the historical and the personal are inextricably linked, like two sides of the same sheet of paper. My work is about how memory itself is political, and the process by which the political is transformed into memory.
I am driven by an urge to retrieve something lost or something that will soon be lost. Walter Benjamin has written about this impulse to return to the past in order to rescue it from disappearance. In his Thesis on the Philosophy of History he says, “to articulate the past historically does not mean to recognize it ‘the way it really was.’ It means to seize hold of a memory as it flashes up at a moment of danger.” In uncovering the historic in my work, I don’t mean to tell the story, but rather I am interested in telling a story – something highly constructed and subjective. In rescuing and remembering the past the work reinvents meaning allegorically — a new story is told.
The work, H-Bomb, The Family of Man Project, created for the TrenchArt Casements Series, is part of a larger project that focuses on the exhibition and subsequent book, The Family of Man. Originally held at the Museum of Modern Art in 1955, The Family of Man was the most successful photographic exhibition ever mounted. The final image in the first run of the exhibition was a large color transparency of the H-Bomb. It was the only color photograph in the entire show of 503 works. In subsequent runs and the exhibition catalogue, the bomb image was removed. H-Bomb, The Family of Man Project attempts to address that erasure by retrieving the coda to the original exhibition. It is an act of reclamation and an act of reinscription.
—Molly Corey, Los Angeles, 2006
Statement for online gallery
