Oceanside Museum’s ‘Memory is a Verb’ spotlights art made during the pandemic

Courtesy Oceanside Museum of Art

The San Diego Union-Tribune: Arts & Culture Newsletter

Works by 11 female artists that are on exhibition at the Oceanside Museum of Art aren’t just photographs. They’re interactive installations, what curator Marisa Caichiolo describes as “little windows.”

The images in Memory is a Verb: Exploring Time and Transience are reflections of the times we’ve been living in the past three years. “Most of this work,” says Caichiolo, “was created during the pandemic (principally in its first year), that time of isolation when we were rethinking and revisiting and reviewing our own lives and connecting with our own feelings.”

At OMA, the exhibition exists in small spaces that invite visitors to inhabit the photographers’ perceptions of their relationships to the world of isolation, to their family members, to those they’d lost and to the feelings that reside in individual memories.

Most of the show’s “projects,” as Caichiolo calls them, were created during 2020 and early 2021.

“The pandemic was this very particular time when people had the time to really focus on themselves and their feelings,” explains Caichiolo. “It was a time to reconsider our situations, our homes, where we were in our lives. It was the same for artists.”

The photographers 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.

“Memories are about feelings,” Caichiolo says. “When we feel something or touch something, we connect with a memory. It can be from years ago or from yesterday.

“These artists went deep into these memories and created a body of work, a story about those feelings.”

-by David L. Coddin