Traci Marie Lee says, "In this body of work I am appropriating slivers of images, text, and artifacts from the familial archive. There is an obstructed rationale of what a photograph is and does, as well as a displacement of the contexts of photographic processes. Incorporating multiple image-making properties and practices, the process of how we contextualize a photograph's objectness and our associations in relationship to photographic material is exposed.

The original content, the index, becomes secondary - taking its unaccustomed place on the periphery of significance. Distinct passageways emerge and are found within the distillation of expectations and longings attached to any familial or institutional space.

Each individual work incorporates alternative processes, such as the kallitype and collodion, as well as various methods of collage. These mediums string together disparate images and artifacts to create an entirely new, complex image.

The success of the Archive represents only half of the material – the half that has survived. The matter lies somewhere in between what is present and what is missing. Perhaps these instances are the keys – the markers connecting bodies and identities, generations and histories; the physical indication of an unidentified connection."

Traci Marie Lee is a graduate of the Corcoran College of Art + Design in Washington, D.C., with a BFA in Fine Art Photography, as well as a Master of Fine Arts in Photography and Integrated Media graduate from Lesley University College of Art & Design in Cambridge, MA. She is also the Owner and Creative Director of TM Creative, LLC.

In her work she is interested in the implications and consequences of the Snapshot and the Constructed Image on memory construction and preservation. The compulsion to excavate and curate leads to finding new methods of holding onto brief, constantly changing realities, as well as confronting her own tendencies and obsessive drive to collect, as a process of examining loss. 

www.tracimarielee.com
www.instagram.com/tracimarielee

--------------------------------