Cathy Tuato Ross

The Winter Garden: an engram

20 April - 8 May

An engram is a memory trace, a supposed permanent change in the brain accounting for the existence of memory, and this project traces memory from experience to reconstruction. Tuato’o Ross is interested in memory, not only as a property of individual minds, but as the basis of social or collective knowledge, traditions and narratives. This project sets out to explore the structure of memory and to emphasize that all memory is also imagination and distortion.

The Artists own words:

Experience, memory and recollection are separated and considered in this new project by Cathy Tuato’o Ross for the Blue Oyster. Memory is almost a bad word now. It has been exhausted and overused, (like identity), but it is not the memory of childhood or nostalgia that this project addresses. The Winter Garden: An Engram presents memory as the basic structure of mental life. The exhibition comprises of three works: dappled light falls in the gallery to create an experience, which is then input into memory and finally extracted and reconstructed. The central piece is an encyclopedic attempt to mimic the encoding of new experience with existing memory in the brain. Over two hundred silver gelatin photographs run like an incomplete crossword along the length of the gallery. Each one represents a single piece of information and it is through the connections and combinations that narratives may be constructed. Through the act of recall, memory is shuffled and reordered like an enormous deck of cards.

That photography can so easily be employed in representing memory invites the question of the lasting impact of a photograph-saturated society on the structure and nature of our brains. Has the split second of photography shortened your “memory span”?