Landin Eldridge
Featured: July 11th, 2025
I have 22,820 pictures currently in my camera roll. I don’t like to delete anything because it feels like asking for bad luck- What if I need it later? What if I picked the wrong one by accident and it’s gone forever? What if the deleted picture thinks it’s not important and gets hurt feelings? In trying to remember and cherish every detail, there’s a lack of editing that my phone’s storage capacity can’t handle for much longer. My art practice functions similarly. I can’t bear to get rid of any potentially special moments, so they all end up layered and mushed together on one page (drawings within drawings within drawings). Transforming, repeating, and re-drawing beloved images allows me to see what I love/hate/can’t stop thinking about all at once.
My drawings are like closing your eyes to retrace your steps. Perhaps you’re looking for lost keys, verifying you didn’t say something stupid at a party, or trying to recall a happy moment in vivid detail. In any case, retracing steps involves mentally placing the furniture in the room, the people on the furniture, and the events of the night in order so that you can find what you’ve forgotten. Unfortunately, memory is not reliable and this recollection will always contain some sort of warping. When making a drawing, I take images through multiple layers of transformation (alteration in photoshop, 3D scanning, printing/collage, photo transfers) to imitate the inaccuracies of memory. The photos in my camera roll represent the beginning, middle, and end stages of this process of transformation. I try and fail to piece together a story with complete accuracy over and over and over again, which is why I have trouble deleting anything. What if it's the key detail I'm missing???
A short list of things that inspire me at the moment: Car bodies, bowling alley animations, t-shirt quilts, strange livestreams and under-visited Youtube channels, targeted ads, sad robots, horses (not a horse girl), cyborgs, low-res lyric videos, bad CGI, New Year’s Eve good luck traditions. I take these inspirations and Frankenstein them together into something that shows how desperate I am to prove I’m paying attention and remembering correctly. The 12 pictures I chose are examples of what I might use in the drawing process. Some just make me laugh, others hold conceptual weight related to topics I explore as an artist (intimacy, grief, guilt, embarrassment, longing). I’ll probably be paying for another storage upgrade soon…
