Ars Memoria / Art of Memory
Exhibition Text for Jennifer Carvalho's upcoming show "Ghost"
I’ve been in New York causing… what can only be described as trouble. This is why living here would be impossible for me. You’ll read about it soon… in some form or another. Today I am sending out the exhibition text I wrote for artist Jennifer Carvahlo’s upcoming exhibit at Franz Kaka Gallery called “Ghost”. When gallerist Ari Hoekstra approached me about writing the text, he gave me free rein to go where the paintings took me. It’s so fun for me to find a particular pathway into work, and as someone who only occasionally writes about art it really was a TREAT!
I hope you enjoy, and if you’re local to Toronto come to the show. You really need to see all the paintings together!
Opening reception is on September 12th from 5-8pm.
Jennifer Carvalho, Ghost
September 13 - October 12, 2024
Franz Kaka Gallery
Ars Memoria / Art of Memory
“Whenever I travel, it’s always to say goodbye.”
There are great human achievements where no instructions have been left. Did they think we would discover an innate sense of know-how? The pyramids are still a mystery, and not without trying. When we squint and strain to read handwritten notes from centuries ago, there is a sense of loss—and someday our schoolgirl cursive will look like ornate glyphs to the modern eye.
In the Middle Ages, people used memory as a set of principles and techniques to pass down and preserve customs for the future. Men and women came together to patch together their remembrances. It was considered an art, ars memoria.
Without curiosity for the past, we lose language, tradition, and craft. We travel to see the churches and crumbling statues of Europe and ask why we do not build such beauty anymore. Really, it is a question of whether we know how to. Hordes of tourists walk by, unable to decipher the signs and symbols left to us with the trust that we would understand—those tourists hardly stop to look.
What does it mean when our eyes must work backwards? Layer by layer, we must detangle the strokes of the Dutch Masters. Original materials disappear, and without human intervention, our artifacts do too. In 1938, W.H. Auden spent the winter in Brussels with Christopher Isherwood. It is there he wrote the poem ‘Musée des Beaux Arts’, “About suffering they were never wrong, / The Old Masters: how well they understood / Its human position; how it takes place / While someone else is eating or opening a window or just walking dully along.” As time goes by, it is in the small gestures of these subjects that we create a rapport for what otherwise seems far off.
In Susan Sontag’s Unguided Tour, two lovers wander Venice during flood season. As they walk through the cemetery on Isola di San Michele, the man remarks, “I don’t consider devotion to the past a form of snobbery. Just one of the more disastrous forms of unrequited love.” As much as we seek the past, we accept that there are things we will never know. Whatever corners we may trace, there still exists gaps of unknowingness, much like meeting the love of your life in middle age. We fill in what we can.
Are ghosts not reminders for the living as to who has been lost? Haunting dark corners to prove they once held court here, too. They remind us of their presence, with a shell of their past power. Much like a painting in a museum, the ghost is tied to one place relying on us to go forth and tell their stories. Virgil tells a despairing Dante that this is no time to tire, “The man who lies asleep will never waken fame, and his desire and all his life drift past him like a dream, and the traces of his memory fade from time like smoke in air, or ripples on a stream.” We are always at risk of forgetting if we do not take care to remember.
Jennifer Carvalho (b. 1980 Hamilton, CA) mines work from Antiquity to the Renaissance to connect historical narratives to the present. Framing the Anthropocene as a shift from earlier modes of telling and inhabiting history, her paintings work to trouble an anthropocentrically linear time, defined by humanity’s tendency to erase, rewrite, and misremember entire histories. With an interest in the slow movement of time through the slow act of painting, she connects this to the idea of knowledge that is lost or passed on through the passage of time. Her work focuses on the inheritance of culture, objects, and ideologies and how they inform her understanding of the world.
love the writing & susan sontag quote ✨
do you know whether there’s a link to getting ticket for the opening night of the exhibit? would love to check it out!