Memory and its complex mechanisms intrigue me—the process itself is a constant rebuilding and deconstruction of what the mind perceives as true. I am constantly questioning the line of truth behind a memory and attracted to discovery of reality and fabrication. My work tends to be research into the idea of memory and the search for a perfect data.

In my work, I began my investigation with fleeting moments such as youth and aging. I began to compare the looks of my youth with the beauty of my mother’s aging, or what my potential future held.  The deeply personal has always had presence in my work. With my father passing away during my youth, all I had were memories. After uprooting and moving across the country from Tennessee to California, I realized I no longer had the comfort of having close familiarities of home around me. With only a notebook of photographs, I started to notice that without the constant reminders surrounding me, it began to become harder and harder to piece things together. It became straining to remember the shape of his eyes, the distinct features that his face held, eventually his voice stopped ringing in my mind.

“Memory is a facet of the human mind concerned with retaining and recalling past experiences, whether they occurred in the physical environment or internally as cognitive events.” Now, memory can exist not only in a physical or cognitive space, but a mechanical space as well. From reality to encoding, storage and retrieval, this constant push and pull sets off a vortex of decay, reconstruction, overwriting, destructive updating, retrieval failure and displacement. All of which could leads us to a distorted sense of past and feeling of forgetting or even rise to a better reality, simply the “best data.”




Kristen Maliksi (Jones)  was born in Ft. Hood, TX and quickly moved to several places while her father was in the military until finally settling in Clarksville, TN near the army base of Ft. Campbell. She received her B.A. from Austin Peay State University with a degree in Foreign Languages with a concentration in Classical Languages in 2006. During her time at Austin Peay, she enrolled in as many photography classes and received a minor in photography. In 2011, she entered into the MFA program at San Jose State University and completed her Master in Fine Arts - Photography. Currently she is working and living in San Jose, CA.