Marking Matters in Time

“Perhaps creating something is nothing but an act of profound remembrance.” - R.M. Rilke

 It is also an act of possibility. We come to see things through our stories about them — a work asks how we remember but also how we produce these recollections, and what senses, what materials, what acts of gathering, cutting, lifting, and collecting anchor memories, or stage their decaying beauty as a transition for new ones.

The object or the memory, which came first? We embed memory in physical remnants of our lives in the hope that we never forget, or might be allowed a selective and elemental remembering, or in the hope that if we do forget, but from an imagined future that isn’t yet made, for an imagined person who hasn’t yet noticed.

Found and represented objects symbolize our engagement with nature as we navigate living, loss, aging and grief; and as we imagine what can yet become of them. Like the elements of nature, beings and their offerings are vulnerable to invisibility, to the melancholy beauties of decay, which are here affirmed and ritualistically intoned.

What’s unseen are the flows of time; the walks that made their way to these things; the hands that grasped them; the curious intimacy of the iPhone that helped recollect them; the tonal and digital processing that made its way back to the hand-made and vulnerable. Things in transition have a beauty in their decomposition. They aren’t done becoming something else.