Informed Memories explores the complexity of racial identity and multiracial heritage within Robin North’s family, shaped by generations rooted in the rural Deep South. Anchored in praxis, the union of critical reflection and lived experience, this body of work functions as both visual inquiry and personal study. North examines how inherited memory and racial constructs intersect, drawing on a lifelong commitment to reading as a method of analysis and interpretation.
At the core of this investigation is Paideia, a concept articulated by W.E.B. Du Bois in The Souls of Black Folk, which frames education as a transformative process of self-examination grounded in one’s cultural and social conditions. Du Bois’s concept of double consciousness, the internal conflict experienced by those navigating multiple and often opposing identities, further informs this work. North engages these ideas not in abstraction but within a specific geography marked by histories of segregation, resistance, and survival. For individuals and families with complex racial identities, this condition is not theoretical but lived and continuous, shaping both perception and memory.
His creative process combines traditional and digital mixed media, using multiple in-camera exposures to represent the nonlinear and multifaceted nature of memory. These visual strategies disrupt fixed readings of identity and history, offering a framework where image-making becomes a method of research. Informed Memories presents memory as both constructed and continuous, inviting viewers to consider how their own experiences are revised, interpreted, and situated over time.
