Project description • museum of a man

This was my first photographic installation work and was motivated by a news story about an amnesia victim. The alleged amnesiac was found on a beach in Italy without identification. Apparently he had been mugged. Soon after entering hospital he began to recall certain facts that pointed to a possible Canadian origin and was taken under the wing of the Canadian consulate in Milan, Italy.

Dubbed "David" by the media, the story became quite prominent in Canada during 1985-86 as the mystery of who he was deepened. My project took three forms: a set of twelve 30 x 40 inch colour photographs of slide projections of famous public museum interiors onto my own domestic space; a set of small black tables with the text of an early 20th century memory experiment lettered onto their tops; and, a video that took all of the stories I could find about the mysterious "David" and strung them together into a continuous narrative that revealed the incredible day-to-day inconsistancies of the media reports. His height, weight, languages spoken and other basic facts shifted radically, often from one day to the next.

The story of David became even more convoluted over the year that I followed it. After a few months of false leads (while David was being housed in Milan courtesy of the Canadian government) he disappeared. A few months later he surfaced