May 30, 2009 - The Lining of Forgetting at
the Austin Museum of Art - Part II
Maybe it’s
because today is my birthday, I was especially drawn to Deborah Aschheim’s work “June 10th.” Of
course, it could just be the green Suess-like structure of her
work - green being the color of brain waves on brain scan
tests. Or maybe just the shiny lights did the trick.
Aschheim took three
film loops of three of her birthdays, and surrounded them with
a 3-D mobile, plastic tube and LED light network to map out her
memories of each event - the people involved, the memories they
invoked, and how they all connect to each other.
The legendary European
artist Louise Bourgeois took a Provencal route for her piece
“Ode
de A L’oubli (Ode to
Forgotten).” At age 93, she took a life-long
collection of linens - dish towels, handkerchiefs, etc. - and
created individual pages of a button-hole bound book of
memories.
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The patterns in the
cloth pieces triggered memories and flashbacks of prior life
experiences, and they are layered to create a brief life
history. One piece is screenprinted “I have a
flashback of something that never existed” - illustrating
a repressed memories that resurfaces later in the work via a
repeating pattern.
Janice Caswell took
her experience working on Barack Obama’s presidential
campaign and created “Making History,” a wall-sized
installation of graphic information from January 2007 to
January 2008. A series of colored dots stretch across the
wall to map the ups and downs of the campaign - both factual
and rumored.
Through the
caucuses, primaries, and election, Caswell charted the
quanitified data of actual polls and outcomes, represented by
one color. A second color of dots represent the emotional
memories she had form the time, as influenced by blogs, media
stories, and the like. Yet another color maps the field
offices - and they all connect ot create a distorted outline of
the state of Iowa. The result is a graphic memory and
perception of the campaign experience.
Other ehibit pieces
range from recalling Shakespeare from memory to digitally
erasing the characters from classic Warner Bros. roadrunner
cartoons. It’s a bold exhibit, and one of the
better to come through AMOA in - well, recent memory.
(Image: Louise Bourgeois, “Ode
à L’Oubli,” 2004, fabric and color
lithograph book, page
18 of thirty-six framed pages, 10.75 x
13.25 x 2 in.; Collection of the artist. Courtesy of
Cheim & Read, New York.; photo by
Christopher Burke)