ReSession: Painting Memory & Music in the Synaptic Space

Description

Chris Gray's oil paintings explore personal and collective memory. Personal memories of local music and musicians in Maine intersect with collective memories and traditions of Realist portrait painters and Irish traditional music, concretized into oil-painted lieux de memoire. The Peircean index is utilized as a form of memory, both in the photographic process, and through the use of indices of collective memories within the finished paintings. By creatively revisiting the past on two levels, including personal memories and their photographic indices, Gray is able to reconnect with these moments, momentarily collapsing temporal distance, and bringing the past vividly into the present in a manner that parallels the transmission of tradition via performance. Through the Proustian binocularity of memory, this revisiting of the past provides an important depth of perspective. Furthermore, the creative act of painting, and the agency of variation and invention that this revisiting enables, allows for the transformative revival of the past into something new, a third memory, or a reconfiguration of identity: a new work of art, which is distinctly present, and which enables the past to be not only revisited but worked through, enriched in form and content, and compositionally transformed. Finally, these works serve as means of reopening and sustaining dialogue with those pictured, transforming memories into paintings and again into very real social reconnections in the present.

Other Projects by Chris Gray