The act of memory as art: Current Utah Museum of Contemporary Art exhibitions offer impressive scope for viewer to absorb

The act of memory as art, viewed within a far-reaching scope of how it reverberates through human expression, is the dominant theme in the current exhibitions at the Utah Museum of Contemporary Art (UMOCA). 

The Utah Review summarizes each of the shows: 

IN MEMORY: continuing through Feb. 22, 2025

In a review of a rare exhibition of poet Bernadette Mayer’s Memory installation, written for the Paris Review in 2017, Presca Ahn explained that the installation “functions as an artifact. In the late sixties and early seventies, when conceptual art was assuming the formerly exclusive prerogative of the literary, artists like Mayer were compelled to make work whose primary content resided not in its physical substance but in a conceit set forth in advance by its author.” Created in 1971, Mayer’s installation comprised 1,100 photographs and six hours of audio chronicled over the course of a month.

Curated around the themes of the document, remnant and ghost in our acts of memory, UMOCA’s current exhibition In Memory is a masterful contemporary art exploration of the artifact form. There are, for example, an oversized print of a love note written by hand on notebook paper; a René Magritte etching representing a man with his mind that has shattered into pieces scattered in all directions; polyester fabric recreations of intercoms, light fixtures, and fuse boxes from an artist’s former residences; a documentary film of figures of Taino goddess figures an artist carved into the limestone caves at a park in Cuba she made after returning to the country for the first time in many years; an elevated take on the family portrait painting but reproduced with photos found in estate and garage sales that are posed and reconfigured to create an idealized image of the blended family.

As Ahn noted in her Paris Review piece, “The act of memory is always an artwork, no matter how raw it purports to be.” What Mayer created in 1971 is precisely what individuals do today on social media to construct and create the documentation of their lives. Considering the 21st century context and setting, In Memory  tantalizes the mind of the viewer to examine ourselves as we consciously curate the documentation of our lives through platforms such as Facebook, X (formerly known as Twitter), Instagram, TikTok and YouTube and how that might appear in a gallery exhibition fifty or sixty years from now.Returning to Mayer, as Ahn explained, “What she called her ‘emotional science project’ adhered faithfully to its rules: one roll of film and journal entry per day, a map of the artist’s consciousness. But the result is no more or less scientific than any other narrative of the month of July 1971. The artist has tampered with the data, and so has time itself.”

In Memory features works by 21 artists from around the world and its scope merits more than one viewing, in order to appreciate the value of an intimate, persistent gallery encounter with these works. The viewer then has plenty to absorb in contemplating the act of memory and how their own ‘emotional science project’ [as Mayer described it] might appear decades from now.

There are jewels everywhere in this exhibition, including René Magritte’s 1966 etching L’aube a’ L’antipode, a vivid portrayal of memory and trauma. The work is on loan from Dr. Noémi Mattis, a psychoanalyst who inherited this piece from her father—who was a friend of Magritte. This Surrealist work embodies the uncanny and starkness of his imagery and the enigma of getting to its actual reality. “Everything we see hides another thing,” said Magritte in an interview toward the end of his life. “We always want to see what is hidden by what we see, but it is impossible.”

Daisy Patton’s pair of reimagined family oil portraits mounted on archival prints,  from 2021 — Untitled (Pink Family with Light Aqua Flowers) and Untitled (Father with Two Daughters and Painted Backdrop with Campions) — started from photos found, respectively, in Beijing and Cairo. These works dynamically resonate with the artist’s life experiences: born to a white mother and an Iranian father she never met and her childhood was marked by moving between California and Oklahoma. As Patton previously explained, “Family photographs are revered vestiges to their loved ones, but if they become unmoored, the images and people within become hauntingly absent. … By mixing painting with photography, I seek to lengthen Roland Barthes’ ‘moment of death’ (the photograph) into a loving act of remembrance. Bright swathes of color and the use of painted floral patterns underline relationships and connections to the natural world and beyond, adorning and embellishing these relics with devotional marks of care. These nearly forgotten people are transfigured and ‘reborn’ into a fantastical, liminal place that holds both beauty and joy, temporarily suspended from plunging fully into oblivion.” 

Using a polyester fabric that was once common in traditional Korean summer apparel, Korean artist Do-Ho Suh creates remarkable sculptures and installation pieces. In 2022, for a solo exhibition at the Seoul National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, he made two 1:1 replicas of a childhood residence and an apartment building he lived in during his time in Rhode Island. For the UMOCA show, sculptures from 2019 made with the same translucent organza-like fabric highlight the intercoms, lighting fixtures and fuse boxes from places he variously has lived in, including New York, London, Berlin and Providence. The translucent character of these pieces remind us of the challenges we have in preserving memory in its clearest possible form because memories naturally are blurred, jumbled and fused over time. When we are young, our memories are translucent because we are constantly stimulating ourselves. These pieces reinforce the possibility that even as we age, as long as we stimulate ourselves much like we did during our younger days, our memories can forestall the opaque filtering that comes naturally as time passes. 

The artifact of memory as ghost is prominent in Emily Hawkins’ two pieces from 2023: Dress Worn by Two Sisters and Dancing Dress I, both presented as monotype on paper. Here, she portrays how fragments of childhood memories remain in the objects we have outgrown. To wit: consider how parents — and mothers, in particular — will preserve dresses, baby shoes and other objects signifying their child’s life, ensuring that the memory of such times is as durable as the carefully preserved object. 

The bittersweet nostalgia of a school crush and first love pops bigger than life in Michael Scoggins Thinking About You, Again (2007), produced with marker and Prismacolor on oversized paper. The handwritten letter is filled with expressions of the juvenile enchantment with finding the perfect love (at least for the moment), along with margin notes and words underlined and stressed for impact. It is well worth reading, especially because the fountain of emotions expressed make today’s use of instant messaging, texts and chats seem almost sterile, monotone and lacking in the fervent burst that typically comes with adolescent discoveries of dating, crushes and romantic euphoria. 

Video installation pieces for the In Memory show deserve viewing in their entirety. From 1981, Ana Mendieta’s Esculturas Rupestres (Rupestrian Sculptures) reminds us of the indelible imprints of our ancestral and native roots even if we have been far removed from them, either voluntarily or by necessity or force. A Cuban exile. Mendieta returned to Havana in 1980 for the first time since her childhood. During her visit, she carved figures of Taino goddesses and the silhouettes of her own physical figure into the limestone caves of Jaruco Park, outside of Havana proper. Shot originally on Super-8mm black-and-white film, this nine-minute documentary has been transferred to high-definition digital media. The metaphorical connection to the place of her birth is expanded beautifully in this documentation. It has been nearly 40 years since her untimely death in New York City, when she was just 36 years old. It is important to note that Mendieta considered the photographic and video documentation of these etchings as significant as the art itself, a counterpoint to the ephemeral nature of her work. 

A captivating video, Helga Landauer Olshvang’s Diversions (2009) is a documentary amalgam of footage, reels and videos of leisure, play and comfortable life taken from various European locations. Maria Stepanova mentioned this film in her 500-page book In Memory of Memory: “a refuge for the lost and forgotten,” and “a requiem to the Old World…[that] covers decades and is barely broken into individual voices.” It is strongly encouraged to view the video through its entirety, just for the sake of seeing the final title card in the film: “The last scenes were filmed on the coast of Europe in Late August 1939.” 

Oscar Muñoz’s Dystopia (2014) is a near-hypnotic video presentation of the theme of erasure that is profound in The Ministry of Truth that is found in George Orwell’s 1984. In the video, we see pages from a Spanish translation of the book dipped into a liquid that destroys their eligibility — or, as curator Dennis Brzek explains, “a gesture almost like a reverse typewriter, setting letters free.” Muñoz’s work fascinates for how it asks us to reconsider erasure not just as a authoritative tool of control and censorship but also for its potential to appropriate and revitalize it specifically for the purposes of speaking back to and challenging authority. In other words, erasure is not just about the act of obliteration but also one that posits erasure as an act of creation for invigorating the canon of literature that responds with drawing the more elucidating parallel between erasure and censorship of those who have been most affected by acts of authority who sought to erase their presence in the first place.

Just as engrossing is William Kentridge’s Second-hand Reading (2013. Kentridge’s (a South African artist) seven-minute video incorporates the 1914 edition of Cassell’s Cyclopædia of Mechanics and the Oxford English Dictionary as background for drawings in ink, charcoal, and watercolor that move, flutter, dance and fall off the page. The soundtrack features a Sesotho traditional funeral hymn performed by composer Neo Muyanga, so the video is paced as a meditation. The elements together produce a rhythm that modulates from slow and deliberate to rapid, restless and even frantic. “The studio is an enclosed space, not just physically but also psychically, like an enlarged head; the pacing in the studio is the equivalent of ideas spinning round in one’s head, as if the brain is a muscle and can be exercised into fitness, into clarity. So, the fragments are the internal noise, each finished fragment a demonstration of those impulses that emerge and are abandoned before the work begins,” Kentridge notes in his artistic statement.

The subject of artificial intelligence makes a striking appearance in the show, Hannah Baer’s Nude Deepfake, a 2023 AI-generated image that was featured on the cover of ArtForum. Baer used “a so-called deepfake generator that invited the user to upload any image of a clothed woman. Using AI, the program then redraws the same picture as a nude.” The moment of the image is consequential: this was the first time their body appeared and was documented as female. As the exhibition notes explain, “Here, AI produced a reality and created a memory of a body that is yet to exist.”

Baer’s work sparks a conversation we have yet to have about the ethical issues of artificial intelligence and whether it is possible to harness the technology for constructive purposes. Many already are aware of the presence of deepfakes during this year’s presidential election campaign. A 2023 Reuter’s article indicated at the time, “There have been three times as many video deepfakes of all kinds and eight times as many voice deepfakes posted online this year compared to the same time period in 2022.” The use of deepfakes is doubling every six months and some industry experts predict that in 2025, there will be at least eight million deepfakes that will be widely shared on social media.

Just as fascinating are Edward Bateman’s Spectral Device No. 1-8, which are part of his series Science Rends the Veil (2015, printed 2017 Edition 4/10). Bateman’s pigment prints on rag paper pigment paper harken back to the popular spirit photography of the 19th century. The use of photography coincided with a widespread fascination with the “immaterial: aura and apparitions; séances and levitations; transfigurations and the spirits of the deceased,” as explained by author Philippe de Montebello. Bateman uses his own trick of technology to demonstrate that regardless of the time of origin of the image, the desired emotional impact of the seen image can be manipulated to fill in gaps in order to soothe one’s mind and conscience that, indeed, an immaterial world certainly exists. 

Extending the vein underlying such ideals, Dario Robleto’s The Heart’s Knowledge Will Decay (2014) arises from archival prints of three centuries of various human pulse and heartbeat tracings, presented on glass slides in pine boxes, adorned with engraved gold mirror, brass, black tape and marker.  The artist’s statement summarizes the creative impetus for the work: “Whether a loved one or anyone is there to grasp our final beat, the harsh truth for the vast majority of hearts is that they share a similar physical and memory fate: Silence and forgetting through cessation… For billions of people, information about their hearts was never recorded because we had not yet developed the technology to do so. But can art find a way around this, opening new pathways to empathize with forgotten hearts by making them beat again?”

Dalila Sanabria’s installation made from cardboard and styrofoam Repisas (2024) effectively inverts the perception of these materials as disposable and forgettable. The installation is a recreation of her childhood home in a Colombia, reconstructed from her mother’s detailed archival records. The use of common storage materials reflects Sanabria’s childhood experiences when her father was deported to Colombia when she was 12 and eventually the entire family was displaced and sent into exile. 

Later this month, UMOCA will present a panel about the connections between memory and displacement, with Renato Olmedo-González, who came to the U.S. from Guadalajara, México and is the Arts Council’s current public art program manager. Panelists will include two artists currently featured in the museum, Milan Mozari (Language of Movement) and Sanabria, one of the In Memory artists and who is currently living and working in New Haven, Connecticut. Also joining the panel will be Kristina Gibby, who is on the humanities faculty at Utah Valley University. The panel program will take place Oct. 24 at 7 p.m. and is free but requires advance registration. For more information, see this UMOCA link. 

Other shows include:

David Baddley Carmel Diagonal: continues through Jan. 11

There is a unique viewing experience of simultaneous calm and mesmerizing in David Baddley’s Carmel Diagonal, a short film currently available in the museum’s CODEC gallery. But, this is no conventional image of a beach in Carmel, California. In tandem with the exceptional exploration of capturing and preserving a moment for memory as in the main In Memory exhibition, Baddley’s film is an elucidating lesson about the camera’s limitations in framing what we directly see as the holistic experience of being on the beach at sunset and as the light gradually wanes into darkness. By the end of the film, all the viewer has is the rhythmic sounds of waves crashing ashore.  To emphasize the point, Baddley, a professor of art and photography at Westminster University in Salt Lake City, takes us away from the conventional framing of the scene by setting the scene in a diagonal, so that the filmmaker can place the sky and the setting sun in the frame. The end of the video happens as a result of the camera shutting down before being exposed to the effects of overheating. For our generation where we, by natural reflex, instantly grab whatever device we have on hand to record a particular moment for whatever reason, do we consider that we could be missing the full impact of profoundly emotional, enlightening or spiritual feelings that etches a memory into our brain because we did not put ourselves wholly into that experience? 

Kym McDaniel: If I could take me from that room, I would never give me back (2024): continues through Oct. 19

Having taken on numerous roles as an experimental filmmaker, multidisciplinary collaborator, choreographer, curator, performer, and educator, Kym McDaniel’s installation in the museum AIR Space gallery reflects the convergence of their creative pathways for expressing themselves. In a variation of McDaniel’s path, the unifying theme— anchored in theoretical constructs that the artist has studied intensely — extends McDaniel’s exploration of how their life in art and dance has evolved after a head injury and chronic illness. 

This installation augments the prevalent objective of memory recall that brought to bear the main In Memory exhibition to its realization. McDaniel’s presentation comprises a three-channel video and a sculptural installation consisting of extension cords, power strips, fishing line, lightbulbs and medical tape. The artist reframes the timeline as evidence of how McDaniel has contended with their recovery from trauma. Note the VHS footage of thermally printed images that have been naturally altered when exposed to light and time, with the video playing looping continuously throughout the duration of the exhibition. The sculpture in the main space of the gallery replicates the body’s complex neural network. The most significant aspect of McDaniel’s installation reflects what many scientists now explore, for example, that upend conventional perceptions about aging and our ‘biological clocks.’ That is, the process, rather than being viewed from a discrete and ordinal perspective, is actually more illustrative of studying trauma, aging and other events as a longitudinal, continuous phenomenon — akin to the installation that McDaniel has created.  

Margaret Curtis: This, Too: continues through Nov. 9

Few artists currently capture so compellingly the turbulent, volatile and tense tones of the contemporary American sociopolitical landscape than Margaret Curtis. Her paintings inspire visceral responses and reactions, highlighting intense saturation of colors which are magnified by how she textures the paint with implements such as a cheese grater, hand-carved stamps or tools for decorating cakes. The narrative and poetic premises of her subjects and the landscapes are emphasized by her keen interpretations of conventional tropes, by flipping their meaning and exposing their contradictions, in stunning clarity.  

Forget the memes we casually share on social media about the discontent and fears of dystopian futures or societal collapse. With a direct punch and their piercing epiphanies, Curtis’ paintings take the viewer quickly to real events without exaggerating the gravitas of their impact. For example, a landscape reflects the scars left in the Pecos wilderness in New Mexico, especially after the 2022 wildfire in the Calf Canyon and Hermit’s Peak. As she explains in her artistic statement, “I am tinkering with cultural gas lighting itself—the play between a seductive surface and the mechanics of power quietly working away underneath —hoping to expose something more relevant, direct, and honest.”

Milad Mozari, Language of Movement: continues through Jan. 8 

UMOCA’s regular offerings of multidisciplinary exhibitions have pushed successfully through the boundaries of traditional genres and how we define them. Their longitudinal perspectives are especially valuable for encouraging the viewer to consider them through their personal experiences. While Milad Mozari is on the College of Architecture and Planning faculty at The University of Utah, he cogently applies the fundamentals of structure and layers in projects that traverse several forms of artistic expression and ties them together in unexpected ways. The longitudinal core of Language of Movement reveals splendidly the long interaction he has had with Ghaffar Pourazar, an Azerbaijani-Iranian computer animator who became a Beijing Opera artist. Mozari documents Pourazar’s artistic transitions in a biographical way that embodies the experience with personal trips and events. Mozari introduces us to that life: an Iranian by birth, Pourazar went to a Cambridge boarding school in his teens and went on to become a professor in mime and animation. More than 30 years ago, after attending a Beijing Opera performance in London, he left teaching when he was in his mid-thirties and moved to China because he was enthralled by the production. Eventually, his training in his new interest led him to a limited-speaking role, which he continues to perform at the Beijing Opera. Mozari documents the transitions in archival photographs, video, and sound and Language of Movement is a perfect title for the migration and evolution of an artist who responded to the sparks in his creative spirit and journey. 

James Talbot: I Spent the Last Year Learning to Love Green: continues through Nov. 2

Astutely integrated with other current UMOCA exhibitions dealing with the act of memory as art, James Talbot’s I Spent the Last Year Learning to Love Green complements the Utah artist’s second edition hardcover 140-page book of the same title that was published last year by Slow Worm Press. Talbot originally self published the title in 2022. He presents a convincing case for considering photography as a literary form, and challenges the viewer to consider whether we are constructing or reconstructing memory or it becomes a function of both. The photographs invite us to think about the profound complexities inside the images Talbot has presented in tandem with the text printed for each one. The narratives we construct reflect the life experiences we have which are shaped more by ambiguities and gaps than by certainties or assurances of the relationships that have been a part of our lives and our individual worldviews. The inherent lyricism of Talbot’s presentation subtly directs us to realizing the refined and  reverberating power of memory in how we continuously construct and reconstruct our metaphysical selves.