If you kiss him, you won't dream about him.

© Chloe Alexandra Davies - Irene, reading. © Chloe Alexandra Davies - Carved home. © Chloe Alexandra Davies - Where she went. View all images ↓
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'My mother turned to me and said,

"If you kiss him you won't dream about him."

Well, I couldn't stand him.

He was laying there, in his coffin, stone-cold, I had never felt or seen a dead body before.'

By addressing the legacy of violence within the familial setting, 'If you kiss him, you won't dream about him' disrupts the cycle of insobriety, trauma, self-contempt and negative tendencies which have roamed around my grandmother and mothers' memoirs for many years. The work is a visual response to the indiscernibility of anecdotes within their past lives, an alternative reference that investigates intergenerational conversations. Truth and multiple perspectives interplay significantly on the narrative outcome. With no photographic evidence of these events, the images dramatize and alter the state of truth and history within the family archive.

Using visual representations of the recollected stories, where performance and duplicity play critical roles in the act of smoke-screening reality, I play with these modified anecdotes. By reconstructing and simultaneously appearing in these visual plays, I embody the characters and their mannerisms as a means to look back at the choices they have made and question how much of the psychological, genetic past I have carried forward in my own life.

© Chloe Alexandra Davies - Irene, reading.
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Irene, reading.

© Chloe Alexandra Davies - Carved home.
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Carved home.

© Chloe Alexandra Davies - Where she went.
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Where she went.

© Chloe Alexandra Davies - Broken Foundations.
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Broken Foundations.

© Chloe Alexandra Davies - I'll give you a horseshoe, you'll need all the luck.
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I'll give you a horseshoe, you'll need all the luck.

© Chloe Alexandra Davies - Sunbathing with coffee.
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Sunbathing with coffee.

© Chloe Alexandra Davies - Get the gun?
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Get the gun?

© Chloe Alexandra Davies - Glass sky.
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Glass sky.

© Chloe Alexandra Davies - Cup and saucer.
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Cup and saucer.

© Chloe Alexandra Davies - Playing Irene.
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Playing Irene.

© Chloe Alexandra Davies - Irene.
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Irene.

© Chloe Alexandra Davies - It was as though time stood still.
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It was as though time stood still.

© Chloe Alexandra Davies - Irene and John, watching TV.
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Irene and John, watching TV.

© Chloe Alexandra Davies - Irene and John, at the dinner table.
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Irene and John, at the dinner table.

© Chloe Alexandra Davies - Under the iron I lay.
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Under the iron I lay.

© Chloe Alexandra Davies - Silenced.
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Silenced.

© Chloe Alexandra Davies - Re-growth.
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Re-growth.

© Chloe Alexandra Davies - Caged like a bird.
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Caged like a bird.

© Chloe Alexandra Davies - Chicken and the sword.
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Chicken and the sword.

© Chloe Alexandra Davies - A cup of tea will solve everything.
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A cup of tea will solve everything.

If you kiss him, you won't dream about him. by Chloe Alexandra Davies

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