Memory Palace I: If not a note, a chasm curated by Neptune in June
Memory Palace I will be installed in the group show “If not a note, a chasm” curated by Nepture in June for MAPSpace, 6 N Pearl Street, Port Chester, NY. The exhibition will run from June 1 to 22nd.
If Not a Note, a Chasm is a study on lost narratives and supposed wasted energies. Within certain larger systems that are designed to
inspire futility or exhaustion, hope often feels naive, indulgent, or is held as a special secret—as both a luxury and a deep necessity.
The exhibition brings together practices that look at systems working as a powerful tide to exhaust us. Many of the artists instead
perpetuate highly personal ways of redirecting or tapping into pre-existing structures of knowledge and energy. Featuring
large-scale installation, sculpture, photography, drawing, painting, audio, and mixed-media works by Serdar Arat, Jesus Benavente,
Sarah Crofts, Margaret Inga Urías, Steven Pestana, Jennifer Tazewell Mawby, and Kris Waymire.
Memory Palace I is a multi-track, site-responsive, interactive, sound installation. Looping audio tracks are played based on by motion control sensors triggered by the audience engaging and moving through the exhibition space. Although a visual artist, I have come to realize that my intuition is often auditory and experienced through the memory of sounds or snippets of spoken language. As such, sound has been a “secret” part of my artistic practice. My sound work is about the phenomena informally called “earworms” and the obsessive repetition, remembering and misremembering of sounds, music, text, and lyrics. I understand this impulse to be related to the role that sound and music plays in memory and storytelling. Considering and observing memory has been even more relevant for me over the last four years as I have been recovering from a brain injury that compromised my cognitive recall abilities.
Despite the fact I’m not a musician and I can’t really sing, I make these works using my own voice and simple percussion; tapping my body or striking together quotidian objects. I use simple and age-old compositional structures like the round, and call and response. Originally created as scores for my short films, the tracks purposefully contain glitches and are intended to sound human, imperfect and a bit earnest. The tracks are a little bit like remembering parts of music or a song and being unable to remember it accurately and to only be able to remember parts of it.
