One Twenty Nine
February 12-27th, 2022
The gallery is open 12-4 Saturday and Sundays
Created through an ongoing obsession with miniatures and the stark realization that death erases all, this collection of mixed media sculpture seeks to pause and examine the inevitable decay of our memories through a lens of childhood naivety.
Where do you keep your memories?
One Twenty Nine is a collection of memories masquerading as sculptures. Each memory biome is constructed with an attempt to harness the crude approach demonstrated by a child building a wildly inaccurate historical diorama for a Social Studies class. Using found objects, miniature items, and personal artifacts, each scene is encased in resin: quite literally suspended, frozen in their moment. Recalling an early obsession with miniatures alongside the stark realisation that death erases all, the work seeks to pause and examine the inevitable decay of our memories through a lens of childhood naivety.
When my mother died, a large part of my personal archives died with her. A person who held my childhood memories in a more mature vessel, a vessel that perhaps could remember the difference between the real and the imagined, was gone. Without her validation to confirm the hazy recollection of my pre-teen years, I felt untethered, removed from my own experiences. Relief came in sharing these feelings with my siblings while also being startled by the vast differences in our memories.
The documented inability for the immature brain to process and store autobiographical experiences as memories contributes to a blurry recollection of personal events both real but mostly imagined as we age. The childish fabrication of memories and objects alike is messy and confusing, given that the choices made by the juvenile self in assigning value are often irrational. An iridescent sequin is a rare jewel, a dead snake is a piece of magic, and it doesn’t matter if everything is soaked in rain water.
One Twenty Nine draws upon the time spent in my first, remembered childhood home: a rented 3 bedroom, 1 bathroom cabin that housed 7 people for almost a decade. Using my own memories, and calling upon my siblings and father to contribute their stand out experiences from that home, I hope that I have managed to recreate with some accuracy the seminal moments and places of my early years. While a direct reflection of my own childhood, One Twenty Nine invites the viewer to pause and contemplate their own personal, constructed archives.
@clarelannan