You Should’ve Been There: Curated by Aaron Levi Garvey
Just as trompe-l’œil in painting can fool one’s eye into believing illusions are reality, memories can also perform their own sleight of hand which causes us to question ourselves and our recollections of individual and collective events. From dates and times of formative experiences with family and friends to professional life events and day-to-day chores, our memories are collected and stored deep in our subconscious constantly. While we often relive memories through conversations and interactions with one another, the slightest mishaps in our recollections can shape new and authentic seeming reconstructions which fill memory gaps. These vague moments which are filled subconsciously fabricated anecdotes distort the entire instance being recalled. Perhaps they come in the form of exaggeration and outrageous storytelling or hazy and obscured details which seemed minor at the time of the event but alter the iterated version’s recounting completely.
Memory trompe-l’œil parallels the phenomenon of time-slice errors, where our minds recall the substance and details of an event with accuracy, but distort the sequencing and moments in time. The memory is real–however the timing or places are not. These errors reflect the brain's struggle to track the sequence and timing of our experiences and sew them together with other lived events throughout our lives. Unlike a computer, our memory doesn't come with time-stamped entries, and it is up to us to recall our direct experiences as accurately and acutely as possible. Instead, it reconstructs events based on context, emotional cues, and associations. Sometimes, that reconstruction goes slightly off — blending one experience into the time frame of another.
This exhibition explores how memories can often be deceiving and create mythologies from our subconscious, and further questions our own introspection when reminiscing of times passed or life-events that we experience. While memories can often be sentimental and fond or worrisome and disturbing, their records are rarely perfect and not without a bias. Our recall of moments or feelings of a time passed become slightly skewed by our own hopes and wishes. They bend and reshape, presenting us with images that feel vivid and true, yet are subtly altered and misplaced. These distortions are not failures but part of memory’s creative process to place more of ourselves within these experiences, blending perception, imagination, desire and ambition together. The works on view reflect how we store, retrieve, and sometimes disremember events and our individual pasts and invite us to consider how personal recollections overlap with collective histories. How our emotions influence what we remember, and how time itself can shift the scale and sequence of events. This exhibition asks visitors to consider when memory is authentic or when it is inaccurate, and what truths can we find, not in the accuracy of the moment, but in the poetic introspection and act of remembering.
