 |
| From The Age, 15/7/2010, Featured is detail from Ann Brennan's work. |
Artist: Ria Green 
Artist: Bettina Hamilton
Artist: Alister Karl
…little memories are those seemingly inconsequential, unarchived everyday thoughts and things that trigger our remembrances , our actions and quietly confirm our identity...
To speak of little memories presupposes a prior condition of the concept of memory that is something other than commonplace, something more than recollection associated with the personal pronoun me. Richard Terdiman proclaims that “memory is so omnipresent, so fundamental to our ability to conceive the world that it might seem impossible to analyze it at all.”[1] And yet our analysis of memory promises more than everyday, commonplace, fundamental cognition. It also promises us everything from affirmation of spirit and soul[2] to usefulness as a social tool that can contest historical narratives.[3]
Within a poststructuralist and postmodern framework the value of the notion of memory lies in its facility to question and disrupt the authority of society’s meta-narratives.[4] Memory, promises a way of bearing witness that has the potential to contest dominant knowledge and understandings of the past.[5] In this condition, memory is intertwined in a dialogue with history: knowledge and power. Maurice Halbwach’s formulation of collective memory (as opposed to individual memory) places memory within the realm of the public, the shared experience of social groups.[6] In this form, memory and the (hi)story of the individual, is implicated in the memory and (hi)story of the larger group. Memory becomes a specifically, social phenomenon that shifts from being the asset of individual minds and spirit to a collection of social practices and artifacts.[7] Much emphasis of recent memory discourse and re-presentation centres around our collective memory and to this end the concept of memory has become synonymous with the memorial and collective (hi)stories.
While this condition of memory emphasises the significance of the personal and the private in re-framing and challenging the grand narratives of society, it also tends to consign memory’s significance to the collective. Engaged in this circumstance, memory becomes a kind of political and strategic tool of contestation. It enmeshes itself with questioning the truth of society’s re-presentations of grand narratives. To some extent, this focus on our collective relationship with the past and its ethical consequences, eclipses memory’s everyday, relationship to the self. It is this prior condition of the concept of memory that little memories respond to.
In a society purportedly inflicted with “mnemonic fever”, an obsession to remember in order to re-assert ourselves within the fast, paced, amnesia of contemporary life [8] little memories re-asserts memory’s integral role in our constitution and re-presentation of self. The exhibition little memories recount narratives of me and I: of self. Complicit in the idea of little memories is the notion of time and past. However little memories are not simply sentimental and nostalgic yearnings for a return to the past or to a past self. Rather little memories are: past made present; ever shifting, evolving and analogous with becoming.[9]
Writer and artist Marion Piper’s, Lend me a moment, 2010, challenges the notion that what is traced in our memory becomes an intransigent template for our future self. Piper’s work inflates mini-narratives and the data of daily situations into poetic statements. The somewhat nostalgic act of writing and recording memories for prosperity, and the romantic ideal of the poem is undermined by the ostensibly, nonchalant presentation of the work on clipboards. The work invites us to page through and contemplate seemingly, carefully recorded memories, but the significance of each layered re-collection fades in and out of itself shifting it’s impact at each present moment.
Also autobiographical in nature, Lucy Farmer’s work combines quirky, drawings of animals, collaged onto floral wallpaper with one-liner statements about the artist’s relationship with her mother. These mixed media collages do not reflect idealised narratives of childhood. Instead they re-present the artist’s confrontation with the authenticity of her re-collections of her relationship with her mother. Farmer explores the impact of these memories on her adult self.
Installation and video artist Colleen Jones re-creates an equally idiosyncratic re-presentation of self as memorabilia. Her work is made from personal, hoarded memories and mnemonic objects. Her deformed, toy-like, soft sculptures and grainy, video footage shifts our understanding of nostalgia as an idealised yearning for the past into an uncanny obsession to reintegrate past into present.
Sarah Edwards, Ria Green and Alister Karl, utilise the notion of the archive to re-assert the (hi)story of the individual. They acknowledge memory as a diverse and shifting collection of social practice and material artifacts, but use these to quietly re-affirm self. Their somewhat obsessive archiving of personal, as well as collected , forgotten and discarded, found objects re-present a mapping of their own journey and shifting self-perception over time.
Little memories are those re-collections that pass through our consciousness and re-construct our understanding of both past and present moments of existence. Mieke Bal asserts that “time is where subjectivity is produced” and affirms that time is memory’s plaything.[10] Bettina Hamilton asserts memory’s connection with subjectivity and time. She playfully inserts recalled and re-presented song lyrics onto a clock face to highlight the effect of memory on her current negotiations of self.
Renee Ferris’s ritualised and performative re-collections of her mother’s passing remind us that memory has the potential to assist with our re-construction of self. Ferris repeatedly recalls and draws the creases and patterns of the sheets and pillow of her mother’s bed at the moment of her death. Each rendering both reinforces and disperses her re-collections. Each re-collection cathartically re-presents Ferris's understanding of past and present self.
Ann Brennan’s work also emphasises that in our negotiation of new stories our future retains a trace of past time and memory but what emerges is an evolved state. Tanya McCracken’s photographs also invite the viewer to explore the connection between presence and absence, past and present from the haunting, pathos of silent, empty and derelict living spaces.
The territory of little memories is, of course, no less implicated with discourses of knowledge, power and social environments than other conditions of memory. Meaning making, and re-presentation, which is arguably always based on memory[11], always occurs within a pre-existing social field. The artists in this exhibition, each acknowledge that memory is essentially social. While each maps their own journey and asserts that the personal still prevails their work is not overly, self-indulgent or inaccessible.
The artists’ work in this exhibition confirms the importance of those otherwise disregarded, non- monumentalised details of our own personal (hi)stories that threaten to slip away until we utter …I remember. Sometimes, ostensibly insignificant, it is precisely this littleness, this seemingly inconsequential, everyday, quiet re-affirmation of being and the individual that makes little memories pertinent.
Lenni Morkel-Kingsbury 2010
[1] Terdiman, Richard, Present Past: Modernity and the Memory Crisis, Cornell University Press, New York, 1993, p 8.
[2] In Matter and Memory, Henri Bergson affirms a connection between memory and spirit. He argues that pure memory, or memory that has no material existence and is associated with ideas, does not simply exist in the so called, storehouse of our brain. According to Bergson pure memories are virtual, that is they do not manifest until actualised through interaction with perception or in dreams and, as such, they are spiritual manifestations. He asserts that, “with memory we are in very truth in the domain of the spirit”. p 320.
[3] Hodgkin, Katherine and Radstone, Susannah, Contested Pasts: The politics of memory, Routledge, London, 2003, p 2-3.
[4] Ibid.
[5] Ibid.
[6] Klein, Kerwin Lee, ‘On the Emergence of Memory in Historical Discourse’, Representations, No69, Winter 2000, p 127.
[7] Ibid, p130.
[8] Huyssen, Andres, Twighlight Memories: marking time in a culture of amnesia, Routlege, 1994, p 6-9.
[9] Henri Bergson argues that while memory in its process of actualization from virtual to present perception, “remains attached to the past by its deepest roots” ( Matter and Memory p 148) it does not concern a regression from present back to past but is a progress from the past into the present. Memory is complicit with time and duration. Suzanne Gurerlac in Thinking in time: An Introduction to Henri Bergson further explains that for Bergson memory is virtual and “involves a mode of existence of the past: (but) also participates in a process of becoming present, or self actualizing.”(p187)
[10] Bal, Mieke, ‘Performance and Performativity’, in Travelling Concepts in the Humanities, a rough guide, University of Toronto Press, Toronto,2002, p.177.
[11] Huyssen, Andres, Twighlight Memories: marking time in a culture of amnesia, Routlege, 1994, p 6-9.
The exhibition little memories is a group show featuring ten emerging artists: Ann Brennan, Sarah Edwards, Lucy Farmer, Renée Ferris, Ria Green, Bettina Hamilton, Colleen Jones, Alister Karl, Tanya McCracken, Marion Piper, curated by Lenni Morkel-Kingsbury, on display at Brunswick Arts Space from 9 – 25 July 2010.
The exhibition examines the concept of little memories: those seemingly inconsequential, unarchived everyday thoughts and things that trigger our remembrances, our actions and quietly confirm our identity. It brings together a range of works including soft sculpture, drawings, video, installations using kept and collected personal objects, poetry and writing, etchings, archives of found objects, collage and photography.
The artists in this exhibition each deal with ideas of memory, identity and time. Their works traverse notions of: past and present, authenticity and truth; absence and presence; nostalgia; collection and the personal archive; the mapping of personal journeys; as well as catharsis and personal growth.
Image 1 : Renee Ferris, Etching No.4,2010
Writer and artist Marion Piper’s, Lend me a moment, 2010, plays with the autobiographical nature of memory, inflating mini-narratives and the data of daily situations into poetic statements. Lucy Farmer’s quirky, drawings of animals, collaged onto floral wallpaper with one liner statements about her relationship with her mother, playfully warn us of how childhood memories can unwittingly, continue to inform aspects of our current identity. Installation and video artist Colleen Jones re-creates an equally idiosyncratic kind of memorabilia that is itself made from hoarded, childhood memories and objects. Her deformed, toy-like, soft sculptures and grainy, video footage shift our perceptions of nostalgia from an idealised yearning for the past into an uncanny and somewhat scary obsession.
Image 2: Colleen Jone's installation, soft sculpture.
Sarah Edwards, Ria Green and Alister Karl each explore their little memories in collusion with the idea of the archive. Ria Green re-presents found, perhaps even discarded or forgotten, paintings that may have once been treasured possessions, decorating personal and domestic spaces, as museological specimens. Sarah Edwards, Pinion, 2008, Pod 2008 and Finders Keepers, 2008 document and map the artist’s re-collection of her daily ritual of walking the same path between home and her studio. Edwards’ collection of sorted, organised, and archived objects and detritus invite viewers to explore, reminisce and find new meanings for each collected object, for each little memory. Alister Karl re-presents his personal collection of Tonka trucks, symbols of his childhood. These are stacked from floor to ceiling in an old, wardrobe under the stairs of the gallery, perhaps affirming that if stacked in the right way, our references to the past, our memories won’t topple, won’t disintegrate or fall.
In a society supposedly inflicted with an obsession to remember, to affirm the past in order to re-assert ourselves within the fast, paced, amnesia of contemporary life, little memories signals memory’s integral role in being; in our constitution of self. The exhibition little memories reminds us not to overlook the little narratives of me and I: and the potential of memory to renew and reassert self. Each artist affirms the importance of those otherwise disregarded, non- monumentalised details of our own personal (hi)stories that threaten to slip away until we utter …I remember.
