ARTS OF RECOLLECTION
One of art’s most important jobs is to help us remember and to raise new perspectives on our memories, often finding beauty in the vestiges of our consciousness. From early man wanting to make sure he did not forget the beasts that crossed his path, painting their likenesses on cave walls, to a wider array of scenes and ideas captured on canvasses, photographs, and digital bits, art and memory have been dancing together for millennia.
We want to keep and sometimes embellish what we have already collected.
Like photo-Magritte, artist Jennifer B. Hudson's, “Jumping Off Point” is a digital photograph series, printed in archival pigment ink, that captures the surreal state of longing and the struggle to remember. The brain appears to reach outside, to connect with something timeless, like nature, sprouting new synapses and neurons that connect with the life force of a tree, but losing bits of themselves in the process.
If I could save time in a bottle... or collect my friends and loved ones in jars.... Gabriel Barcia-Columbo's recent work, “Animalia-Chordata,” memorializes his life by capturing six of his friends in giant glass jars. The multi-media sculpture uses video mapping and projection, capturing each friend in a jar, like a firefly. You can see the friends move and react to you, some trying to escape their enclosures, others trying to reach out and touch you.
Barcia spoke about his work recently at TED, as well as his love for natural history museums as “cabinets of curiosity,” obsessive personal digital archiving, and his medium: repurposed everyday objects, to keep our memories in magical suspension.
“My life has been a tapestry of rich and royal hue.” Carole King’s lyrics take shape in El Anatsui's giant hangings. El Anatsui takes fragments of the past—in the forms of old bottle caps, printing plates, and other mostly metal archeologica—and weaves them into a tapestry.
Currently on exhibition, hanging from the facade at the Royal Academy of Arts in London, “TSIATSIA - searching for connection,” a giant piece, measuring 23m x 15m, shimmers and gleams as a backdrop to more distant pasts, as it teases us to consider our own.
Watch the installation of the work in this time lapse video.
Fashion design has considered spanning memory for decades in retro styles, but now, as haute couture rises again from a heavy pile of ashes, it works our memories in new ways. "Fashion is the only thing that can travel... from the old world to the new," proclaimed Karl Lagerfeld, this week at Paris Fashion Week.
Lagerfeld’s latest Chanel show contrasts bombed out memories against futuristic materials and shapes, stretching, more than spanning the arc between then and now.
Video: Courtesy of FashionTV
Vivienne Westwood's Fall 2013 show at Paris Fashion Week showed recollections of American Indian and European design sensibilities of the 1920’s, 30’s, and 40’s, fused with visions of the future. Far beyond common retro-design, it is a bi-polar pull of memory and dreams, back and forth, until the two vibrate together.
Read about Recollections all this week in Arts/Design, Food/Drink, Nature/Science, Mind/Body, Place/Time, and Soul Impact. And enter our photo competition this week. The theme: Recollections (Deadline, July 7th, 2013).
