Upcoming Event: little memories exhibition

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.

Renée Ferris’s, etchings of her mother’s bed at the time of her passing, emphasise how memories pass through our consciousness and re-construct our understanding of both past and present moments of existence.

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.

Image 3: Detail, Sarah Edwards, Pod, 2008

Implicit in the work of Tanya McCraken, Bettina Hamilton and Ann Brennan is an exploration of memory and its complicit relationship with time. Bettina Hamilton’s, Reservations, 2010 playfully inserts recalled and re-presented song lyrics onto a clock face, highlighting the effect of passing time on our perceptions of the past. According to the artist every now and then the clock needs to be readjusted because it loses about 20 seconds a day but she states “this is just fine by me because every time I look at it, it apologises for its lies.” Ann Brennan reconfigures images of knights and ballet dancers cut from old, books, in a stage- like wall to floor collage. Brennan’s work highlights that in our negotiation of new stories, our future retains a trace of past time and previous contexts. Tanya McCracken’s photographs 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.

Image 4: Tanya McCracken's haunting photographs of empty, derelict living spaces

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.