Do Ho Suh
Do Ho Suh
Staircase-III, 2010. Do Ho Suh is a South Korean artist who works primarily in sculpture, installation, and drawing. Suh is well known for re-creating architectural structures and objects using fabric in what the artist describes as an "act of memorialization." Is home a place, a feeling, or an idea? Suh asks timely questions about the enigma of home, identity and how we move through and inhabit the world around us.
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Frank Halmans
In his work, Halmans often explores the domestic world and sees a home as a place where life fluctuates between a public and a private sphere. Halmans examines how we as humans live in these two different areas. One could call the artist a 'house expert': he is an accomplished carpenter, plumber and bricklayer and therefore knows everything about houses. Within his work, however, houses or parts of them assume a kind of dream shape. In this respect, his series of "architectural vacuum cleaners" reflects his vision well.
"Forgetting is alarming," he says, "everything has been in vain, meaningless, if you were content with forgetting."
Basement II, 2014.
Even more Rooms for Reading, 2014.
Some New Rooms, 2021.
Pim Palsgraaf
Pim Palsgraaf, Reflections of Emptiness 07, Wood, stained wallpaper, metal, 190 x 50 x 145 cm, 2021. Pim Palsgraaf is inspired by decay and irregularities in the city. The discord between nature and urbanity are relevant topics and perspectives in meta-modernistic thinking. Palsgraaf’s work is a result of an ever-deepening investigation into the erosion of the inner city. Empty spaces – old corridors and ceilings that are about to collapse and where nature is stepping in to take over – nourish his fascination for this process. In his work Palsgraaf focuses on the lines of perspective from which we build the world around us. For a while, Palsgraaf worked within the existing systems of how to draw the world around us, but a few years ago he decided, rather, to investigate the fundamentals of the world around us. The fundamentals, according to Palsgraaf, are in how people construct the world around them. This often leads to dualisms in society. Nihilism and consumerism, irony and naive informality live side by side and simultaneously. Palsgraaf decided to investigate his own perception and spent five days in a completely enclosed dark room, without time or noise. It soon became clear to Palsgraaf that time is only a concept, perception a construction of the mind. He decided to continue with these discoveries and to investigate how he could interweave these findings and translate them into his work. His aim is to convey his experiences of time and perception and to bring the viewer into a moment of silence and total doubt, in which all the hold of the world is completely gone.
Pim Palsgraaf, Burn your bridges 13, Wood, stained wallpaper, carton, 40 x 50cm, 2021.
Pim Palsgraaf, Traces of existence, Wood, stained wallpaper, metal, 320 x 180 x 210 cm, 2017.
St James Wood, Co Waterford
Ireland’s prettiest ghost estate: Quaint 800,000 euro thatched cottages sit empty because no one can afford them
Perhaps the fact that they started at an asking price of 820,000 euros each, when auctioneers say they are now worth just 200,000 euros, is the reason they lie empty.
Though some locals once suggested to a reporter that the unused development should be knocked, it has now been rescued by two Waterford city businessmen, who bought the 14 properties. According to the Property Price Register, numbers 11 to 14 were bought for €85,000 each last December, while the first 10 were purchased for €850,000 in February this year.
Marc Yankus - The Space Between
Empty Lot in The West Village, from the series The Space Between, 2014
Three Blue Windows, from the series The Space Between, 2013.
Side of Building, from the series The Space Between, 2013.
Building Split, from the series The Space Between, 2013.
In this series, select historical buildings are portrayed in altered cityscapes and invented spaces that evoke the experience of memory, imagination and dream states playing out in a magical place. Strangely familiar, the buildings are elevated in a fictional composition that appears to tell a story or reflect a past history, but their power resides more in the realm of sensation than explicit narrative. The buildings seem to emerge from the landscape, shaped by the space around them or, in some cases, by the space between them. These surrealistic alterations of New York’s architectural skyline are a cross between imagination and documentation. As portraits, they are meant to reconstitute awareness and preserve the buildings through adjustments in reality and perception.
I’ve always been drawn to the majestic details and materials of classical historical buildings, many of which are hidden from view, tucked behind new architecture, or simply overlooked. Often discovered from rooftops or accessible from private views, I feel compelled to capture the slivers of the old, recreate the buildings to make them whole, and restructure them in place and history.
Alexis Soul-Gray: Memory Play
THE HORSE WHISPERER, 2024
A SEA OF GRIEF CONDUCTED BY A LITTLE LONE CHILD, 2024
THE GARDENS BELOW VESUVIUS, 2024 and THE GARDENS, 2024
I have a friend who worked in a bookshop some years ago and told the story of a parent coming in with her small child looking for books on dinosaurs. She was pointed in the direction of a few possibilities but returned to the desk for assistance. ‘Why are there none with photographs in them? He wants photographs.' Alexis Soul-Gray’s work returns us to this slip in the carriage of truth, as she engages painting’s flexibilities: kneading and teasing her late mother’s absence and absence from images into malleable, surrogate forms. Images of mothers and children from brochures and catalogues pervade the work, as willing but vocational substitutes. If the photograph goes misty, has been erased, never existed or just won’t tell the particular story that needs telling, we can seek out a cast of cut-outs and re-shape and bend the visual languages of our pasts to suit. There is no resolve or reformation of the past conjured through time travel but painting as a DeLorean for its exorcising is, here, materially exquisite, bringing us a theatre of seductive substitution. ‘I attempt to find the untouchable, the impossible in the faces of these women and children, they are my mother and I, but also and at the same time, you/they/them and nothing at all.’
Christian Boltanski
In his installations and mixed-media works, Christian Boltanski uses photographs and found objects to question memory and individuality. An awareness of mortality, and of the general tenuousness of human existence, haunts his work. According to the artist, while individual memories might prove to be fragile, they are still filled with truthful yet unique values, making it the reason why he has often been choosing daily items as main creative elements to construct an archive of humanity
Christian Boltanski, Chance-The Wheel of Fortune, Installation View “Storage Memory”, Power Station of Art- Shanghai, 2018, Courtesy Power Station of Art
Christian Boltanski, Humains, Installation View “Storage Memory”, Power Station of Art- Shanghai, 2018, Courtesy Power Station of Art
Christian Boltanski, Personnes, Installation View “Storage Memory”, Power Station of Art- Shanghai, 2018, Courtesy Power Station of Art
In French, the word “Personnes” has dual meanings, referring to either “persons” or “nobody”. Here, the artist uses this double-edged word, which denotes presence but literally contains absence, to emphasise the inescapability of death and how chance watches over the destiny of each.
Chiharu Shiota
"Everything I create is from a personal experience but I want to extend it into something universal." Stepping into one of Chiharu Shiota’s striking installations is like entering an alternate reality: the materials and objects feel familiar, but the logic behind the intricate web structures seem to stem from an unknowable realm. Enveloped in an elaborate web of yarn, you’re left with a subtle, indescribable imprint on the body and mind.
The Key in the Hand, 2015. Installation: old keys, wooden boats, red wool. Japan Pavilion at 56th Venice Biennale, Venice, Italy For the 56th Venice Biennale, Shiota unveiled ‘The Key in the Hand' (2015), a piece created for the Japanese pavilion. In this installation, 180,000 keys gathered through an open call were suspended from dense webs of red yarn, which linked the gallery space to two wooden boats on the floor. A photograph of a child holding a key was displayed alongside four monitors featuring videos of young children talking about memories before and after they were born. For the artist, keys are a personal object that simultaneously keeps our space safe on a daily basis and has the potential to unlock doors to new, unknown worlds. The keys dangling from thousands of red strings evoked a sense of intercon-nectedness and expansiveness, allowing viewers to imbue their own memories and associations to the familiar everyday item.
Counting Memories, 2019. Installation: wooden desks, chairs, paper, black wool. Muzeum Śląskie w Katowicach, Katowice, Poland For ‘Counting Memories’ (2019), an installation shown at Muzeum Śląskie in Katowice, Poland, the artist envisioned a network of black yarn extending from the ceiling to be a night sky, or a universe, filled with white numbers dotting the space like stars. The piece invited viewers to sit at desks (also entangled in black yarn) where they had the opportunity to answer questions and contemplate the significance of numbers in their lives: Numbers that have special meaning, numbers in the form of dates, numbers connected to personal histories. As with many of her works, the installation attempted to make visible the invisible threads shaping our inner and outer lives.
Chiharu Shiota – A Room of Memorya, 2009, old wooden windows, group exhibition Hundred Stories about Love, 21st Century Museum of Contemporary Art, Kanazawa, Japan
Frank Poor
When he first began crafting his multimedia works, artist Frank Poor drew inspiration from his childhood home, using old photos as a foundation for his delicate basswood sculptures. Now, the Rhode Islander takes his cues from other buildings he photographs—often abandoned ones, which invite onlookers to wonder about the people who once lived in them. Such was the premise for Locust. “I’m drawn to it somehow,” he says, adding that it reminds him of the Georgia farmhouses he grew up around. For this work, Poor sketched the house’s basic structure, then cut pieces of basswood to build its frame. After gluing the pieces together, Poor hung the resulting sculpture against the photograph, which he’d altered to exclude the building’s framework. “I’m removing the 2D house and replacing it with a 3D version,” he explains. Poor likens the house in the original photo to a cicada shell: The building is an “encasement that has been emptied,” he says. “Life has left it, but it has left its impression.”
House - Gowensville, SC, 2021, basswood, Baltic birch plywood and inkjet print, 96” x 36” x 26”
Windows – Elk Creek, VA, 2024, glass, digital transparencies and wood, 32” x 47” x 2”
House – Meridian, MS, 2020, basswood and inkjet print on rice paper, 16” x 34.75” x 9.5”
He is motivated by nostalgia and his architectural sculptures evoke the concepts of place, time and memory. His work tries to hold in one place what is there and what is gone and missing.
thoughts on memory
louise bourgeois / aftersun (2022) / joan didion / phoebe bridgers / carmen maria machado / st vincent / lisa ko
