Non-memory: Remembering beyond the symbolic

A New York exhibition, Jamais Vu reimagines and reflects our own collective unremembering and our lived experience as a time capsule – what do we want to recall about our present reality?

- K.O. Nnamdie

The moment I entered "Jamais Vu” at anonymous gallery in New York, I am met with a precise spatial arrangement: All the works in the exhibition are displayed within a deliberately unfinished renovation.

Looking at Michael Abel’s Before Christ 08 (Self Portrait of Bill Zhou Facing Life and Death), 2024, a motif evokes Gustav Klimt’s Death and Life, 1908, within the gravitational pull of Abel’s landscape this motif is recontextualized and turned inward, opening up. The exhibition highlights the fluidity with which each artist moves between conscious and unconscious histories. Yet, while the artist’s methods may vary, seriality and indexical relationship to the memory are recurrent motifs. The show opens with Myles Gables’ Face, 2023, a painting which at first glance may portray a being that has both organic and biomechatronic features, and also calls to mind an anthropomorphic test device (ATD) or simply, a crash test dummy arrested in motion after impact. In Antonio DeLaRosa Gallegos’ Highland Pinstripe 31 <—> 719 Pinstripe Burial, 2024, a young boy in a pinstripe suit is depicted standing strong and looking forward, towards the future. Gallegos’ mentions this painting is a depiction of a foreshadowing before an event had manifested. This work reanimates the artists lived experience and the truth of life and its ongoingness.

Most of us have had the experience of encountering a person who looks very familiar, yet we cannot recall having met. A related phenomenon is déjà vu, a vivid but inaccurate feeling that the current situation is familiar. This strong sense of familiarity occurs in the absence of any explicit evidence that the situation was previously encountered. Déjà vu is generally accepted to be a memory-based illusion resulting from a brief bout of anomolous activity in memory-related structures of the medial temporal lobe. Jamais vu, sometimes regarded as the opposite of déjà vu, is the intense feeling that the current circumstances are novel and strange, while objectively realizing that they have, indeed, been previously experienced. Both déjà vu and jamais vu occur under ordinary situations. Compared with déjà vu, jamais vu is less common in normal populations and much more prevalent in some neuropsychiatric conditions; this difference in prevalence suggests that novelty and familiarity may be signaled by different brain pathways.

Jamais Vu reimagines and reflects our own collective unremembering and our lived experience as a time capsule – what do we want to recall about our present reality?

"Jamais Vu", curated by K.O. Nnamdie is on view now through May 11, 2024 at anonymous gallery at 136 Baxter Street, New York, NY 10013.

About the artists:

Michael Abel (b. 1990, Alberta, Canada), Chinese-Scottish artist, was born and raised in Didsbury Alberta, Canada. Michael Abel’s paintings represent the mistranslation of self through a mining of conscious and unconscious histories, memories, and popular culture. Recurring, and often found symbols and misrepresentations are re-contextualized through techniques of oil on linen and grattage: a term coined by Max Ernst to describe a technique of scraping wet paint with a sharp blade.

Myles Gable (b. 1996, Seattle, WA) is a New York based oil painter. Gable is a self taught artist who works from his own photographs and found imagery. His work explores themes of nostalgia, familiar figures, and landscapes. Gable’s practice primarily engages with the act of painting itself, focusing on the labor of process and ways in which he can create a dialogue between his gestures to the conditions of memory. In both taken and found imagery, Gable is interested in visualizing the moment of the experience in its novelty.

Antonio DeLaRosa Gallegos (b. 1990, Seattle, WA) is a painter living and working in NewYork, NY. His practice is centered on observation and reminiscence. Through the process of painting, Gallegos attempts to capture the fleeting subtlety of contemporary life, as well as excavating the subtlety of his earliest memories.

PARTICIPATING ARTISTS:

Michael Abel , Myles Gable , Antonio DeLaRosa Gallegos .