Participating artists: Taylor Baldwin, Clifford Borress, Barb Choit, Brendan Fowler, Ted Gahl, Rashawn Griffin, Faten Kanaan, Zak Kitnick, Jason Lazarus, Lauren Luloff, Dave Murray, Amanda Ross-Ho, Jean Shin, Hayley Silverman, Agathe Snow, and Bryan Zanisnik. As museums have mounted more exhibitions from their permanent collections, revisiting their archives and breathing new life into years’ worth of holdings, this generation’s artists are also looking back-revisiting materiality, composing and recombining nontraditional materi... Read more

Participating artists: Taylor Baldwin, Clifford Borress, Barb Choit, Brendan Fowler, Ted Gahl, Rashawn Griffin, Faten Kanaan, Zak Kitnick, Jason Lazarus, Lauren Luloff, Dave Murray, Amanda Ross-Ho, Jean Shin, Hayley Silverman, Agathe Snow, and Bryan Zanisnik.

As museums have mounted more exhibitions from their permanent collections, revisiting their archives and breathing new life into years’ worth of holdings, this generation’s artists are also looking back-revisiting materiality, composing and recombining nontraditional materials, perhaps out of necessity, or as a comment on a collective loss of intimacy through lives lived online. NOT THE WAY YOU REMEMBERED explores how collecting and displaying personal, physical objects creates and recreates memories and associations, both individual and collective. Collecting here refers to the artist’s methodology, with the amassing of specific, charged materials being central to their practice, or, simply, a visual accumulation of things. With the process of selection and presentation often made explicit in the work, the items assembled project “specialness” or preciousness, while often lacking that quality inherently. Situating the ordinary, banal, familiar or personal into grander narratives activates new sites of tribute and remembrance. Considering the popularity of television programs about collecting (and hoarding), we are reminded that sentiment and physical attachments are powerful motivators. The artists in REMEMBERED use the power of association to explore the ways in which objects become invested with emotional and intimate value. The resultant arrangements-of trophies, scrapbook clippings, family snapshots, replicas of cultural artifacts-begin to collapse the distance between spectator and object in the sometimes alienating space of a museum, reconnecting viewers to the physical, emotional world of memory and daily experience in an age where the virtual often displaces the real.

NOT THE WAY YOU REMEMBERED is curated by Jamillah James, Queens Museum of Art Van Lier Fund Fellow.