Imperfect Recall

About

Curated by Paul Smith, artist in residence at the Architect's Gallery, autumn 2010. Artists: Adam Bainbridge Ronald Ceuppens Oona Culley Julian House Simon Reid Hugh Russell Alexander Sirbu Paul Smith Ruth Uglow Daniela White Imperfect Recall brings together a group of artists exploring memory as trace and fragment. Working in a variety of media, all ten artists map the rich and unsteady ground between past and present; history and recollection. Whether drawing on found material, as in the case of Ceuppens, Reid, Sirbu, Smith, and White or producing false memories from the familiar outlines of 1960s nostalgia, like House, the works question simple notions of recollection and feeling for the past. Ceuppens's works are a serious play with the historical archive — the documents and photographs that form our sense of the past - as new works of haunting beauty emerge out of the paper chrysalis of these fragments. Russell and Culley construct works that, in different ways, fix the evanescent traces of memory in forms that thus are inherently distorted. Shadows and outlines invite the viewer to supplement what has gone — to flesh out an individual and subjective aura of the object-as-presence — but which can never replicate the lost original. Uglow and Bainbridge work through layers of media to produce works that evoke the rudimentary, uncanny landscapes of the unconscious. Bainbridge's processes of making, photography and drawing remind us of the contested nature of memory in psychoanalysis: something laid down deep in the psyche, fitting primordial narratives of the self, and never straightforward photographic recall.