MAPPING MEMORY

A traveling art project curated by Jill Moniz and Cynthia Penna

The pace of post-modernity has had deleterious effects on concepts of authenticity, identity and epistemology. Who we are and what we know depends more and more on our location, both spatially and temporally. How we hold on to and record our understandings, as well as our questions, are of paramount importance if we are to retain and celebrate the fabric of ideas that have sustained us through the ages.

Painting, as an act and product, is one of the oldest recorded art forms, yet holds limitless possibility as individual artists employ paint to create authentic self-expression. The practice of painting bridges the past to the contemporary. There is no postmodern flattening of memory in the effort because the act and the result map the history of the medium, and in many cases the identity of the painter.

An encounter with a painting is an cartographic experience, where the work holds layers of meaning and material that resonate with the viewer’s own intelligences that reference diverse spaces and places in memory and time. As curators, we are interested in those intersections of memory, between the canvas and the paint, the artist and the practice, and finally, between the work and the viewer.

In an effort to engage artists in a collaboration that uses painting to reveal these memories, we have devised an innovative project that encourages artists to incorporate the layers and intricacies of paint and memory into works of intense personal and popular meaning. We have selected ten artists from around the globe to paint ten different canvases in collaboration with one another. Each artist will begin a canvas, and each artist will complete a canvas, leaving some aspects of the contributions of the other artists visible.

The canvases will not only circle the globe as each is sent to the locations of artists around the world, but also map each painter’s ideas and hopes for the medium, as well as expose certain aspects of cultural perceptions that in turn can influence and effect the other artists and the audience. Once complete, the give works will be exhibited in California and Italy, the locations of the curators and in different countries corresponding to the origins of the artist.

In keeping with the inherent theme of charting manifold meanings, the exhibition will highlight the trajectory of each canvas, with photographs and videos detailing the project from each artist’s perspective. Our hope is that the canvases and the accompanying documentation will show the similarities and differences in how we as humans create and remember.