Memory is intensely personal, intensely powerful. For each of us as individuals, our memories establish where we've been, who we are. They are the threads that connect our childhood selves with the adults we have become. When we are young and don't have as much to remember, we take our memories for granted. As our memories grow, and as we age, they are something we fear losing. Some events and times are so powerful that they become shared memories— memories that can span a multitude of consciousnesses. In our image-saturated media world, video and photography intervene as a sort of catalyst for these collective memories to disseminate, spreading waves of surrogate recollections across social, political, and geographic boundaries, as well as across time itself. The nature of media – be it a snapshot from childhood, a documentary film, or a philosophical text, inevitably transforms and distorts memory, creating new narratives that can exist in the personal space between history and the present moment.
Metamemory is a group exhibition centered about the notions of time and mediated memory. Three artists: Tatiana Istomina, Atalay Harrison, and Alexandre Cavalcanti, use painting, drawing, photography and video to create a metaphorical landscape of remembered as well as invented past - personal, historical, political and poetic. The show brings together three narratives reflecting personal and collective memories of the participating artists and their respective home countries - Russia, Canada, and Brazil. The combination of the three different perspectives produces a complex network of cross-references, allusions, and commentaries, challenging the viewer to question what has formed the structure and ecology of their own memory and identity.
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