Garden Variety Volume IV (2022)
Artists: Marli Davis, Derek Liddington, and Sarah Zanchetta
Curated by Erin Storus
Documentation by LF Documentation
- - -
The human body replaces its own cells regularly. About 330 billion cells are replaced daily, equivalent to about 1 percent of all our cells. In 80 to 100 days, 30 trillion cells will have replenished - the equivalent of a new you.
Embedded within the body is the soul. Unlike the body, the soul is ancient, carrying within it the memories of a trillion lifetimes, each intricately connected, perpetually flowing in and around each living organism on the planet since the beginning of time - whatever that beginning means for you. How often we forget our past experiences and the lessons we have learned. Do you remember what it felt like to be a child? How will you know what it feels like to be old?
I believe these knowledges are never lost, but they are forgotten. Sometimes these acts of forgetting are deliberate - we're in pain, we don't want to remember the bad things that have happened. Sometimes the forgetting is unintentional. Memories seem to simply slip away. How can we facilitate a process of re-remembering that which appears to be lost?
In Garden Variety Vol. IV, artists Marli Davis, Derek Liddington, and Sarah Zanchetta interrogate how we may begin to come back to what once seemed lost. Combining ancestral worship, childhood memories, and indigenous knowledges, each artist embraces the process of coming back to the self - the soul that yearns to remember. Through the slow unfolding of memory, this exhibition asks us to come back to our ancient selves and the knowledges we once believed were gone. How can we harness our memories to create community and belonging? As we collectively move through increasingly precarious times, it's absolutely vital that we utilize the lessons of the past so that we may reclaim balance within ourselves and our world.
- text by Erin Storus
-
Share