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C104
Review
Dublin: Alice Maher
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Alice
Maher: Mnemosyne, installation shot;
photo John Kellett;
courtesy the artist
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In the otherwise
empty centre of the darkened hall sits a white object,
so brightly lit it seems almost to glow. The venue is
a shabby, boarded-up theatre where the air has grown stale.
The elaborate nineteenth-century proscenium (replete with
the muses 'ceol agus drama') overlooks Alice Maher's sculpture
Mnemosyne - a steel case housing a refrigeration unit.
Slowly during the day it freezes the air around it, accumulating
a soft layer of ice, which is then allowed to thaw overnight.
Mnemosyne,
goddess of memory, daughter of Uranus and Gaia (heaven
and earth), and the mother of the muses, is here invoked
in the form of a bed. Not, it must be said, something
I instantly recognised it as; however, it is certainly
an evocative idea. Representations of beds are frequently
shorthand for a gamut of human experience - love, sex,
birth, death and loneliness; a site, as the piece suggests,
for both the creation and contemplation of memories. That
Mnemosyne draws on the air of the surroundings
to literally make itself mirrors the symbiotic (or is
it parasitic?) relationship that mind has to environment.
And in this venue both mind and sculpture feed off the
atmosphere, the history of the space; it could metaphorically
die in the confines of a white cube.
Some scientists
now believe that memory is utterly, literally chemically,
unstable and that each time a memory is recalled it will
alter before it is re-inscribed into the data bank of
the brain, a process called reconsolidation. Mnemosyne
too creates and undoes itself each day, changing slightly
each time. Like a bed it must be remade each day; unlike
an ordinary bed it is uninviting and cold, more a death
bed for a Snow Queen than a haven for sleep.
Isabel
Nolan is an artist and writer.
Alice Maher:
Mnemosyne, Father Matthew Hall, Dublin,
April/May 2003, in conjunction with the Green on Red Gallery,
Dublin
Article
reproduced from CIRCA 104,
Summer 2003, pp. 91.
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