Witness Marks: Anatomy of a Memory

Witness Marks: Anatomy of a Memory, a multi media installation, explores how we create, store, and access memory.

As Vija Celmins writes, “If you really look at an image.... It stays in your memory. Then memory does other things to it...Sometimes it stays. Sometimes you have to run back and see if you remember it correctly.... It’s an alive experience.”

My metaphorical portrait of a memory will include at least 100 oil on panel paintings installed in a pattern that evokes neuronal structure/function*, accompanied by an electronic music soundscape.

Our brains are plastic. Experiences cause electronic shifts in our brains – literally – and these altered pathways in turn shape our experiences: thus my exploration of memory is informed both by past experiences and those I am having now.

As neurologists have searched for the place where memory is stored, they have found it isn’t in one place, but is, rather, throughout the brain as well as throughout our bodies; any musician can tell you that; any athlete; any person who has suffered PTSD.

While there have been theories of how the brain works for millennia, we only have accurate imagery of brain structures based on dissection spanning from the 1860’s (drawings by scientists Deiters, Golgi, Bevan-Lewis, and Dejerine, to name a few), to Ramon y Cajal’s drawings of neurons ( 1899 – 1930’s), all the way to the wildly colorful and beautiful photo imagery of neuronal circuits generated by supercomputers.

But what do these scientific portraits of the brain tell us about the inner workings of the mind and the inner workings of personal perception and human nature?

Can there be a portrait of a mind as I wish to configure it? One of my mentors, Rockefeller University’s Dr. George Reeke wonders, as he says, “ A neuron’s main interest is its active response to a changing environment.”

The combination of painted objects, the order in which they are hung, their placement physically in the installation and the way in which they are painted (objects might be painted multiple times from different aspects and in different stages of “completion,” echoing a developmental arc of perception), paired with a commissioned electronic score will explore this question.

The electronic soundscape is integral. Dr. Peter Hamlin, Christian A. Johnson Professor Emeritus of Music, Middlebury College, has been commissioned to create this score.

My medium is oil on traditionally hand-made poplar panels covered with linen, gessoed with a luminous chalk ground. Referencing traditional icons, originally religious objects (additional meanings resonate today in the digital world), each panel has a border of hand-applied gold leaf.

If a curiosity cabinet or “Wunderkammer” contained object imagery of my past – and I have already painted many such collections of objects – this new installation explodes the curiosity cabinet into a looping linear form that can be walked through and experienced in real time by viewers. My personal icons will trigger different memories in others, keeping the metaphor of an ever-changing neuron alive.

WITNESS MARKS’ Vermont premier will take place at the Kent Museum, Calais Vermont (http://www.kentscorner.org), date TBD