Episodic Memorial explores the psychological experience of children during wartime, and the resulting displacement and loss of identity and innocence. The images range from sparse “portraits” of vintage toys, to more performative photographs in which I document my own child-like actions of building structures out of vintage children’s blocks, or embroidering historical phrases and messages from children onto personal possessions.

By collecting toys and games with a history that corresponds to various wars and times of strife, I continue my career-long investigation of objects with a collective history and shared sense of memory. In my practice, I use toys as a medium for channeling the perspective of a child who is watching the world be violently dismantled, expressing the loss and tension of a childhood tainted by fear, hiding and death. I am particularly interested in emphasizing the idea of the Home Town , a safe place that becomes unsafe, and how it may be re-imagined in the child's memory. The installations that I photograph depict an anonymous, yet archetypal town – a hybrid between sorrowful memory and melancholy longing.

A sub-series within Episodic Memorial is For Get Me Not, in which I have taken an old memory book from 1933 from a little boy in the Bronx named Jack Gordon and embroidered the contents of each page onto a vintage men’s handkerchief, then re-photographed the item. The memory book contains pages in English, Hebrew, Russian, Yiddish and French as well as numerous signatures. I have meticulously copied the writings on each page, staying faithful to the handwriting and other nuances of each person’s artifact. The series is meant to make a connection between children living in the US , safe from the terrors of WWII and those children to whom I make reference with the toys.