Sam Wrigglesworth

I'm interested in memory as a private experience, but also a public one. How is our identity defined by the memory of past generations latent in our everyday lives?

This series studies gender as a performance through prescribed gestures found in etiquette books and advice columns. The texts I utilize vary in time periods, including anywhere from the 18th century to the present. I examine each text as an attempt to shape our individual identities as well as our relationships with one another. However, these etiquettes come to us through a complicated network with no original manual, therefore no singular text can be exhaustive.

In this work various sitters and I perform for the camera. The theatricality of our actions is stressed by the backdrops and lighting of the studio environment. Some of the etiquettes we perform are foreign to us, performances forgotten generations ago. Others are familiar, inscribed unknowingly into our everyday lives. Still, the text instruction forces us to recognize our actions as learned and therefore strange, extrinsic, and not wholly our own. We were never told how or why to perform in this way; the memory is simply there.