Film
Mail Art
about the art
Memory Surfaces brings together works that explore how memories are stored, revisited, and reshaped over time. Drawing from both found footage and personal experience, the featured artists — Luke Thompson, Todd Woodlan, and Miyo Stevens-Gandara — grapple with the psychological landscapes of childhood and the images we inherit.
Luke and Todd’s film, Spring Ocean Lake, is built from decaying found footage of family vacations, natural landscapes, and family gatherings. The deterioration of the film causes the colors to separate and bleed, reshaping the visual field. What might have been a straightforward record becomes something far less certain, drifting between recognition and abstraction. Todd created the music for the film by combining field recordings, electronic tones, and bassoon into layers that mirror the instability mapped in the film. Together, image and sound create a shifting environment where memory is not preserved, but continually altered, shaped as much by material decay and accident as by recollection itself.
Miyo Stevens-Gandara’s mail art, Grandma’s Basement 2, is part of The Wilderness of Childhood, a long-term series of photographic works Miyo shot in Indiana (her birthplace) and rural Kentucky (the birthplace of her grandmother). The photographs attempt to depict the psychological landscapes of childhood memories shaped by Asian cultural identity and the emotional impact of being a biracial person in the United States. In Miyo’s photographs, family spaces are presented without sentimentality, yet their familiarity carries a quiet charge. What has happened is implied, with memory arising from the viewer’s response rather than from depicted events.