March 25, 2023 - April 16, 2023
White River, South Africa
Click here to view: Lingering, holding memory Exhibition Catalogue
Artists:
Amber Alcock, Catherina Pagani, Cathy Layzell, Eugenie Skelton, Jenny Chadwick, Katja Abbott, Kristen McClarty, Laurel Holmes, Paul Kristafor, Shaune Rogatschnig
Curators: Laurel Holmes and Kristen McClarty
Curatorial Statement
As a response to the concept of holding memory, this exhibition of ten Cape artists invokes questions of what memory is, where it lies, who are custodians of memory, whether real or imagined, personal or collective…
Memory refers to the psychological processes of acquiring, keeping, preserving and in due course, retrieving information. As humans, the creation of memory is essential to our existence and the process of encoding, retaining, and recollecting memory depends on the unique set of data created by our individually experienced circumstances.
Inevitably, this means that each of our recollections is different, based on subjective personal narratives that become amassed and fragmented over time. Our exclusive memories in turn, influence how we perceive the world around us, respond to new situations, regard ourselves, and interact with others.
We rely on our memory but seldom pause to consider the intricacies, nuances and sources of memory, direct or inherited… from family and friends, our communities and societal messaging, personal experience, thoughts, conscious and/or unconscious. Individual or collective.
Memory brings the past into the present and opens it up to the future. Significant objects that have meaning for us not only serve as reminders but can be fundamental to memory, creating at times a visceral relationship between memory and materiality. In Lingering, the participating artists attempt to explore and manifest, through their chosen material mediums, how their memories of inanimate objects, ideas and feelings have their own agency and residue, and in doing so, the artists generate their own inimitable visual language.
As each artist draws from their subjective and fragmented memories, a distinctive collection of works results, where this residue, residual recollection and a particular energy has been distillated. New perspectives are brought to bear, through certain subject matter, by the manipulation of paint by the movement of the artist’s body, through the gentle beating of the clay in a coil pot. The brushstrokes and mark making become a record of the individual and in a way begins to record a new embodied memory, where the artist’s interior world finds expression externally.
Installation Photos
