every copy forgets something

every copy forgets something traces found VHS images through successive acts of translation. Each began as a family memory, television program, or ordinary fragment someone chose to preserve. VHS held it as a magnetic trace; a CRT remade that trace as flickering light; a digital sensor converted the light into pixels; and a printer returned those pixels to a physical surface. At each stage, the image was not simply copied but physically remade.

Removed from their original context, the images carry an uneasy intimacy. Neither artist nor viewer knows what happened before or after each fragment, who first recorded it, or why it was kept. Warped by tape, screen, and camera, these moments feel both familiar and unknowable, like memories inherited from someone else.

From across the room, the subject of each image becomes recognizable. Up close, the scene breaks apart into scanlines, phosphor dots, reflections, colour bleed, noise, and the surface of the print. Moving closer reveals more of how the image was made, but less of what it depicts. Memory behaves similarly: what appears coherent from a distance can fragment under closer observation. Every copy preserves something while quietly forgetting the rest.