For many years now, Linda Armstrong has traveled in developing countries in the Americas and Asia. The trips are pilgrimages where she searches for those scraps of meaning that lead to a more complete understanding of everyday life. In her travels, she notices not the differences in the diverse cultures that she visits but the similarities. She focuses on universal mysteries and timeless questions which then become the inspiration and basis for her visual explorations.

Like many travelers, Armstrong uses two devices for capturing and holding memories snapshots and diary entries. These allow for revisitation and prolonged exploration - they become mnemonics that reawaken thoughts of bygone times, places, and feelings. Snapshots and written entries are shorthand for first person observation. They are testaments to the reality of the experience, external fragments that mark the artist's own development and growth.

Recently, Armstrong began converting her travel photographs into digitized computer images. The original snapshots, made with an inexpensive 35mm camera, are manipulated and altered in ways that enhance and clarify the sensations she felt when originally snapping the shutter. In one recent series, Armstrong heightens these images by juxtaposing swatches of slightly modulated, hand-painted color. The painted areas are commentary, abstracted and non-specific, that memorialize the time when a distant moment slipped from present into memory.

There is a great irony in this body of work. The exotic specificity of Armstrong's subjects, the people and places of Thailand, Myanmar, and Indonesia, are replaced by an eternal electronic surrogate. Belief in the "reality" of the photographic image, and, by extension, belief in the "reality" of the world, is sabotaged. Armstrong is asserting that the fact of place, the reference to the "real" world of actual physical experience as embodied in the photographic image, is somehow less important than what we make of it. The work is a metaphorical discourse between memory and our experience of the moment. The photographs, altered and inexactly substituting for the "real," become visual mantras that free Armstrong to focus on the "other" realities suggested by the images. The pieces frame a dialogue that contrasts commonality and uniqueness, and demonstrates the clash between the hand of the artist and the mind-set of the medium.

Because of these contradictory positions, the work exhibits a somewhat mysterious and impervious veneer. It is resistant to fast generalization. If pressed for literal translation, the work obstinately refuses disclosure. But woven into this outward evasiveness is an inner urgency that calls out for decoding and exploration. This interior content is about the evocation of past experience and the reconciliation with present realities. The work reprocesses Armstrong's personal history and offers an invitation for discourse. It is about experiencing the world but, more importantly, it is an examination of the process of experience. The pieces remind us that, with the exception of the moment, all we know is but a memory.

This essay on Ms. Armstrong's work appeared in the catalog for the Southern Arts Federation/National Endowment for the Arts 1992 Fellowships Exhibition, special supplement to New Art Examiner, Fall 1993.©1993-2001 by Dan R. Talley.