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WINTER PEARSON

March 28 – 31, 2019
Artist talk: Thursday, March 28th, 10 am
Opening reception: Friday, March 29th, 7-9 pm
Viewing hours: Saturday, March 30th, 2-5pm

This body of work focuses on the nature of memories and their effects on recalling space. I was raised with the understanding that we cannot possibly keep everything, and should not get attached to any particular house—property and belongings are borrowed, passed along, and temporary. A sense of home was fleeting, and my ability to place events with a particular space is also escaping me as time passes. After countless down-sizes, twelve relocations, and the ‘seasonal cleanings’ that my mom had us do to keep our belongings to an easily-transportable amount, I have few touchstones. To compensate for the lack of physical contentI try to recreate my homes—my favourite spaces.

I have, however, very few complete memories of space prior to my last family residence, that is, anything beyond 5 years ago. After some reflection, I realize that what I do have is an understanding of space that lies beyond possessions and structure. My mom would pack up rooms every few weeks or so and rearrange the house making it hard to form a lasting impression. Because of this, the work has become particularly ritualistic—drawing every day in order to capture what little information I have before I can’t remember any longer. Most of what I have is memory, and through this work, I am attempting to bring about some degree of permanence to something so ephemeral.

By re-creating the little fragments of physical information I have as they appear in memory, I piece together the ‘home’. The colours of time-dependent lighting, events occurring in those spaces—and the emotions that follow, stain the paper and fabric atop ghostly traces of what had previously been. There’s a vibrancy that a space develops when it’s coloured with all the events that happened there. Each space has experienced different shades of the people inhabiting it, and that’s something to which we can all relate. Then, with the incomplete fragments of information, there is an opening for people to complete the scene for themselves, tentatively filling in the holes with experience from their own past.