Darryl Baird Dallas, Texas
		Listen to this artist. (AU 80K)
		E-mail this artist at rosebud@why.net.

A prevailing connection to the past is reflected in our political, social, commercial, and religious lives; we constantly create and reform our past to rationalize and justify our complicated existence. I'm drawn to explore the "place" that personal memory (as related to photographs) maintains among our cultural assets where the dead are not forgotten, but synthesized into an (often elaborate) system of memories that act as proof for our concept of self. Departed individuals and institutions are major building-blocks of my imagery.

In my experience, photographs hold meaning. That is, they contain an emotional, evidential reality of specific people and/or places in time. Within this evocation of the past, photographs foster a transcendence of our loss and disconnection to the actual (photographic) event.

In this body of work, I'm also exploring issues of contextual influence: the shifting of a photograph's "message" that its context may direct, even control. Instead of external rhetorical devices, such as captions or textual passages to explain an image, I'm creating layers of information, connected by a common surface. By combining traditional, family-album photographs with reversed or "embossed" imagery/text (common to the time period), along with various created textures together into a blended narrative image, I'm working to create an experience external to, yet encompassing, the "transcendent loss." By inserting these unresolved references to other possible realities, I strive to evoke a sense of the mystery, magic, and manipulation that modern imagemaking embodies.