Nancy Drew, Single channel video 2004
For over 50 years, generations of young girls have immersed themselves in the Nancy Drew mystery novel series where the protagonist, an intelligent, beautiful, fearless and perseverant teenage sleuth, serves as their fictional role model. In the video, Nancy Drew, artist Sherry Wiggins intertwines her memories as a young girl reading the Nancy Drew mystery novels with her “real life” memories from that time. Wiggins sketches and paints over actual pages from the novels and places them in front of the camera so that the alteration of images and text allows for a re-narration of the Nancy Drew story and the artist’s life. Thus the work examines the questions---“What is memory?” “What is fiction?” and “How do these narratives color each other?---and allows Wiggins to explores her own identity formation as a young girl and playfully dissect this “mysterious” phenomenon with the help of Nancy Drew.
