Memory is a Verb: Exploring Time and Transience
A Photographic Exhibition
Memory is a Verb: Exploring Time and Transience brings together eleven women exploring the liminal space between time and transience. Represented in this body of work are the universal concepts of loss, mortality, legacy, and the exploration of what inspires us to seek solace and reexamine our histories; subsequently unearthing discoveries about ourselves, our relationships, and our place in the universe.
Memory, often regarded as fixed or reflective of reality, in this project actively functions as a transformative shape-shifter. The ongoing tension between two seeming opposites – objective fact and subjective perception – together shape a cohesive whole, creating something larger and more nuanced than just the sum of its parts. As new insight illuminates the past, this influences our experience of the present moment; which is itself slipping into the past at the instant we seek to define or quantify it. In this manner, time is elusive, elastic, bending back and over itself; perception comes full circle.
The project Memory is a Verb: Exploring Time and Transience began as the world was besieged with fear and anxiety during a pandemic, longing for a return to normalcy. Feeling a sense of loss, we craved connection to our past and to each other. The pandemic also offered a unique moment in which to interpret things differently. Beyond nostalgia, which selectively employs memory as a self-soothing balm, our exploration reconsidered how we view the past, and what is of purpose and significance, in light of our changed circumstances.
Through the artistic expression found in Memory is a Verb: Exploring Time and Transience, eleven women, from different geographies, experiences, and backgrounds, give voice not only to their reality, but to the multitude of perspectives and possibilities contained within. It is a universal desire to be connected and remembered - to honor our past into our future. The search for meaning during a time of profound disruption is a humbling human journey eloquently captured in Memory is a Verb: Exploring Time and Transience.
I Am Of My Time
In her 1939 text, A Hundred Years of Photography, Lucia Moholy began with the quote, "Je suis de mon temps.” “I am of my times.” Considering the near erasure of her pioneering efforts from photographic history, the quote seems like a sad but resolved lament. Despite her extraordinary efforts on behalf of the medium, Lucia was still victim to the gendered discriminations of her time and subsequent generations. She was a prolific photographer, a master printer, a critic, a theorist, and her history of her medium was one of the first that considered more than the technical advancements of photography, yet Lucia’s work has long been overshadowed by that of her husband, László Moholy-Nagy and the other male photographers in her circle.
“I am of my times.” Lucia’s call echoes down to us. Is our time different? Are we still in the shadows? Time marches on and yet we are besieged by stunning setbacks, social criticism, and even the erasure of rights. Recent political and legal maneuvers have reminded women that they are second-class citizens. Despite priding itself on liberal and progressive values, the art world is no different. On average, art by men commands ten times higher prices than that of a woman artist. Men’s work, or men themselves are valued more than women. We are all a product of our times, our value determined by sociopolitical forces. And yet, women move forward.
Memory is a Verb presents the work of eleven women artists who are reexamining various histories in order to fully express and reclaim their contemporary moment. Reaching into the past, these artists restructure both history and the present, creating a new framework and placing themselves at the center. Memory is a Verb reclaims both the self and the framework, demonstrating a state of ownership over both—"I am of my times,” is transformed by their artistic efforts into proud, fierce declarations: “I AM” and “MY times.”
— Lisa Volpe, Associate Curator of Photography, Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, TX
Love Letters
We become ourselves by remembering ourselves.
In Memory Is a Verb, eleven women offer their singular perspectives on time and transience, coming and going, arriving and leaving, in long sentences punctuated by breath, by the moment when the mirror goes up and the curtain comes down.
How to emphasize enough the value and importance of women committing the light they find, the time they spend, to paper; to sharing their lives, as felt, experienced, and imagined in photographs?
All the images in this exhibition and catalogue are “love letters to places, memories, dreams, and family,” as Diane Hemingway writes of her photographs elsewhere in these pages.
These sequences of images are letters sent from each photographer to herself, so that she might bring into being what is so often lost—a lasting record of how one woman envisioned her own private world—
To save what would otherwise disappear,
a legacy, a certificate of presence,
a projection of the past onto the now-empty rooms of childhood,
a layering (that erases the lines between) space and time and spirit,
to hold the love that carries us across what changes, in children, in ourselves,
as we wait for light in darkness, for mirrors to become moons and ponds to contain sky,
to find the secret meanings of objects, in cup and spoon, ink on paper, verbs and nouns,
to see what’s in the offing, in the deep sea of time as it moves from day into night into the unknown-to-come—
in the solitude and loneliness of not being heard, or even seen,
we move toward the stillness at the heart of a series of transformations,
children becoming parents, parents becoming children,
as we translate what lives inside us—memories, dreams, desires—into cinema, into story,
as we travel the distance from girlhood to womanhood and back again.
— Alexa Dilworth, Publishing and Awards Director and Senior Editor,
Center for Documentary Studies, Duke University, NC
Memory as Medium
In the ever-expanding field of contemporary art, memory art has emerged as a subgenre that engulfs subject matter such as autobiography, revisionist and/or collective memory, the archive, nostalgia, repetition, history, temporality, and amnesia. It also considers the impact of museums and galleries in the construction and presentation of history and knowledge.
The medium of photography plays a vital role in this movement. Once understood as capturing and preserving singular moments in time, it is now recognized as having a multifaceted and often slippery relationship to linear and factual documentation. Contemporary artists, such as Hiroshi Sugimoto, Sophie Calle, and Carrie Mae Weems, have embraced this multiplicity by exploring how photography can construct history, memory, and the perception of time.
The artist collective Memory is a Verb situates itself within this larger contemporary movement with its exhibition Memory is a Verb: Exploring Time and Transience. The eleven female artists utilize photography to document the richness and complexity of their relationship to time and memory. The origins of memory art are rooted in processing trauma and difficult historical pasts. These photographers do this through collectively creating work in response to both the COVID-19 pandemic and the quotidian stresses of everyday living, including parenting, aging, and grieving, and seeking meaning through it all. Through their work, these eleven artists remind us all that to remember is to be human. Collectively they celebrate our shared humanity, profoundly influencing how we see ourselves and others. After these past few years of uncertainty and grief, this exhibition maps a way forward toward communal understanding and healing.
—Emily Edwards, Assistant Curator, Dallas Contemporary, Dallas, TX
Curatorial Statement for Oceanside Museum of Art
Memory is a Verb: Exploring Time and Transience is a new group exhibition to be showcased at the Oceanside Museum of Art reflecting on memory, nostalgia, time, and human identity through the lens of eleven female photographers.
The exhibition is deeply rooted in the profound disruption caused by the pandemic—a period that forced artists from different backgrounds and regions across the country to search within themselves as they embarked on a humbling human journey beautifully captured in photography, video, and interactive installations.
The resulting exhibition will allow visitors to engage in the creative process not only through sight but through sound as well.
Ultimately, the project’s goal is to reflect on how memories are formed, whether they exist as fixed reflections of reality or are subject to transformation over time. The featured artworks suggest that even concepts as universal as memory may change, shift, and re-define themselves as time goes by, and this often happens in provoking, powerful, and unimaginable ways.
Unsurprisingly, the past has its own unique way of infiltrating the present moment and forces all of us to re-examine the nature of our memories. Each art piece featured in this exhibition embarks on its own quest to recall the past—be it through an exploration of gender, discrimination, identity, diversity, patriarchy, violence, love, loss, death, family, or environmental issues—in order to deliver a timeline of events that viewers can reflect on.
But the idea that memory exists in the present moment is something that can also be applied to all the artworks presented. As a cohesive collection of works, the exhibition grounds memory as a vital concept in our fast-moving world.
The exhibition’s participating artists are Elizabeth Bailey, Annette LeMay Burke, Dena Eber, Sarah Hadley, Diane Hemingway, Susan Lapides, Annie Omens, Lori Ordover, Jennifer Pritchard, Rosalie Rosenthal, and Aline Smithson.
—Marisa Caichiolo, Founder, Building Bridges Art Exchange, Santa Monica, CA
Curatorial Statement for Bonsack Gallery Installation
Memory—although often considered static—is changeable and built upon individuals’ perceptions. New insights continuously illuminate prior experiences, influencing our understanding of the present moment. Likewise, the present slips into the past at the instant we seek to define it.
Memory is a Verb unites the work of eleven women photographers exploring notions of time and transience. Images of family, friends, and spaces—both familiar and unfamiliar—reflect the artists’ deeply personal meditations on change, loss, mortality, and legacy. Some photographers reckon with the passage of time by returning to the same subject over days, months, or years. Others alter images through multiple exposures or chemical interventions, exploring the vulnerability of photographs and the memories attached to them. Capitalizing upon the camera’s ability to fix a moment in time, these artists highlight the centrality of photographs to our understanding of the past and present.
—Molly Moog, Curatorial Assistant, Pulitzer Arts Foundation, St. Louis, MO