Screen Memory

About

Working across painting, photography, installation and video, the artists each have very distinct approaches yet collectively reveal the paradoxical ways in which individual and shared memories are retrieved and intersect.

The exhibition title Screen Memory is a Freudian term for a particular recollection that masks deeper psychologically significant memories. Within Freud’s theorem memories overlay and obscure each other, but vestiges of hidden layers rise to the top and coalesce. Here, the theory is used as a loose analogy for the ways in which shared and personal memories similarly commingle in the art object. It also refers to the kinds of flat surfaces and literal screens used within the exhibition – in this way, these screens can be seen as planes in which latent and manifest content are contiguous and the distinction between collective and personal content is blurred.

The appropriation art of the post-modern era tended toward a hijacking or disfiguring of mass media images and a sense of psychological distance. Screen Memory however focuses on the lateral and idiosyncratic aspects of quotation and recollection; from the flat effect of simulation and the disquieting effects of fragmentary reminiscence, to the absurd and humorous distortions and ruptures as familiar images intertwine with flights of imagination.

Featuring Richard Artschwager | Wallace Berman | Sara Cwynar | Jamian Juliano-Villani | Mike Kelley | William Leavitt |Sherrie Levine | Dennis Oppenheim | Allen Ruppersberg | Jim Shaw|Sturtevant|Stephen Sutcliffe