Memory Formations, a solo exhibition by Los Angeles-based artist Samira Yamin of unique and experimental images made from black and white negatives of her paternal grandfather, a gymnast in 1950s Iran, in which Yamin uses the physics of photography to come into a dynamic relationship with a man she would meet only once in her life, forming a single memory of him.

In a single exposure in which the light that begins in the enlarger passes first through the negative, the image, carried by light, then moves water, displacing parts of the image before landing, finally, on the page as a formation in which Yamin has entered into an energetic engagement with, creating in the space between the negative and the paper a temporal and kinetic meeting place between her and her grandfather, ordinarily prohibited in time and space.

Memory Formations is a continuation of Yamin’s research and artistic work into the simulacral construction of one’s identity and associations to people and place constrained by geopolitics, by war, namely whether there is something to be gleaned, a connection to be made, by actively participating in the making of an image of, from, the past.