“Through a series of old family snapshots, the true and tragic story of an anonymous couple becomes an intimate narrative about their love, marriage and death. J & D were linked for life, even after they went their separate ways. A moving and poetic film journal.” Canadian Film Centre Worldwide Short Film Festival, 2011.

Screened as part of Recollections, a group exhibition about personal history and inherited memorabilia, The Ballad of J & D speaks to and about the seemingly insignificant elements that serve as part of a domestic suburban portrait, the undisclosed details of family, and the way people remember their past.

To be sure, there is a burden attached to these memories, and it is in a spirit of complicated and problematic personal disclosures that this work is screened publicly.

Delivered as a slide show against the backdrop of a hymn, The Ballad of J &D is a short video that engages with the issues of family attachments, suburban domesticity, and the artlessness of undecoded childhood recollection.

• Wedding Cake. The Ballad of J&D. North Vancouver, Canada (2009).

• Grain elevator on wedding day. The Ballad of J&D. North Vancouver, Canada (2009).

RECOLLECTION – group exhibit, artists’ statement

What makes us attach importance to inanimate things in our lives? Why do certain objects and events call out to us?

Living in a disposable culture we find ourselves, consciously or unconsciously, acquiring and discarding, and the emotions we attach to the things we pick up and toss away can far outweigh their perceived worth.

As inheritors of a history not entirely our own, we cling to the physical and ephemeral remnants of our past, and it is through recontextualizing these objects and events in a gallery space that the artists in this show have attempted to communicate and rewrite their mythologies.

• Recollection postcard, front. Vancouver, Canada (2009).

• Recollection postcard, back. Vancouver, Canada (2009).