NYAB Event - “Historical Access Memory” Exhibition

“Historical Access Memory” Exhibition

Fowler Project Space

This event has ended.

Art, in one of its many functions, is a visual record—a record of an event, a feeling, a considered idea, an environmental snapshot, or the cross section of a process. The act of making art turns the present into the past, frozen in time. Each artist in this exhibition looks to the past in different ways. Some look inward to reveal a memory and interpret it, capturing and preserving it in an illustrative amber. Others record the past in a visual language to be decoded by the viewer.

Four artists, Lucía Hinojosa, Jsun Laliberté, Jenna Lee, and James Vanderberg, have unique approaches to the phenomenon of history and time. A thread is seen in the process of each artist, creating a narrative that dissembles and reassembles the power of memory and history. Even though their technique and approach to object making is different, these artists share a common drive: the reformulation of time and memory through mark making. Vanderberg’s abstract paintings begin with lines in the form of a nautical knot or an unsolvable tangle—triggered by the memory of his days spent on his father’s sailboat. Laliberté investigates a similar tension; through his colorful palette, he aims at creating mental spaces for the viewer, disclosing the process of his own making.

While the works of Laliberté and Vanderberg are concerned with an enclosed, personal adaptation of reality and time, Hinojosa and Lee are interested in the mind’s collective consciousness through the entirety of experience. Hinojosa and Lee both employ symbolic elements that allude to ideology and culture, emphasizing the subject’s interdependence to the world.

Historical Access Memory ultimately seeks to question the differences and similarities between the objective narrative of history and the subjective abstractions of memory, showing how they overlap in the human mind. The poetic dialogue created by the works of these four artists suggests that art—an incessant time-based process—tracks down the intricacies of time’s perception in the human mind.

Please join us for the opening reception of Historical Access Memory on Saturday, June 28th from 7 to 9pm. The exhibition will be on view June 28-July 26, 2014, and it can be viewed by appointment.

This project is sponsored, in part, by the Greater New York Arts Development Fund of the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs, administered by Brooklyn Arts Council (BAC).