Remembering Our Future Death OPENS SATURDAY

Remembering Our Future Death opens this Saturday, March 7 from 5 to 7 pm at Studio Place Arts.  I will be showing this group of photographs together for the first time.  Many of the pieces where made specifically for this solo show.  

There will also be a group show opening in the main floor gallery and another solo show opening on the third floor.  You will find me in the second floor gallery.

installing Remembering Our Future Death

Artist Statement:

Remembering Our Future Death brings together my current reflections on the subjects of memory and death. Earlier stages of my art practice treated these two subjects as discrete and separate from one another. I failed to see their connection, perhaps I wasn't ready.

The physics of non-linear time explains that all time, past, present and future exist simultaneously in the present moment. Applying this line of thought to memory leads me to the idea that memory may extend back to a time before this lifetime while at the same extend forward into future lives. This inquiry presupposes the existence of reincarnation.

Plato believed in a soul that guided the body away from hedonistic drives for pleasure and satisfaction of worldly needs toward a path of deeper knowledge and truth. He reasoned that because we have concepts of Ideal Forms (meaning ideas like God, Truth, Beauty and Reason) even before we personally experience them, our souls must have known them before we were born, otherwise we would not recognize the experience when encountered. Plato believed in an immortal and indestructible soul that passes through a continuous cycle of birth, death and rebirth.

Reading Plato began to pull my thoughts together. He wrote that before the soul is reborn it drinks from the river of Lethe, one of the rivers that flows through the Underworld of Hades. Translated from the Greek Lethe means oblivion, forgetfulness, concealment. Hades is the abode of the dead. Although memories are washed away prior to rebirth, the soul does enter its next incarnation with buried imprints of past knowledge. We spend each life trying to recall what we once knew. Memory is the context for this knowledge and knowledge is truth. I would like to take this one step further and suggest that memory is indestructible and immortal, transformative and mutable, but never too far from the truth of our identity. Memory is our soul.