Film
Mail Art
TBA
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.
The film, Spring Ocean Lake, by Luke Thompson and Todd Woodlan, builds on decaying footage of family vacations, natural landscapes, and family gatherings, which Luke retrieved, processed, and manipulated. The deterioration of the film causes the colors to separate and bleed and thus shape 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, which is part of her ongoing series The Wilderness of Childhood, approaches memory from a more intimate vantage point. The photographs in the piece depict the psychological landscapes of Miyo’s childhood memories which have been shaped by her Asian cultural identity and the emotional impact of being a biracial person in the United States. In her work, childhood spaces are sites of both familiarity and distance, where memory is held not as a fixed image but as something layered, partial, and emotionally charged. Miyo’s piece offers an invitation to reconnect with and explore these forgotten memories.