Anamnesis, 2013

Remembering as a process of gathering and the use of memory as a constructive force underlie Doris Arkin’s artistic production. The exhibition’s title—“Anamnesis”—is borrowed from the field of psychology. In order to put together fragments of life that would shed light on their hardship by understanding its underlying causes, people approaching treatment are asked about their past, about significant events and experiences, about family and social ties, and about their feelings. Some of those, possibly the most significant ones, may not be recalled, or else people may rewrite or repress them as a defense mechanism against pain. The sculptures in Arkin’s exhibition and the process of their making, articulate the gathering and erasing of memories that fabricate one`s sense of self.

Arkin assembles meshes of memory, stitching and unstitching private and collective memories, making her way through mental processes to another realm, which is a place of her own invention. Wandering around the exhibition space, viewers are invited to accompany Arkin on her private process of remembrance and experience it from a personal viewpoint. The exhibition comprises several large sculptural pieces made through time-consuming practices. These unique metal meshes were brazed, welded, and tied together. Most of the sculptures are of simple, archetypal, geometric forms—a sphere, a circle, a line—which contrast with the spatial complexity of the mesh of which they are made. The mesh is an airy surface which delineates form, creating plane, mass, materiality, painterliness. It generates, from remnants of other processes, materials that “remember,” attesting to the process by which they have come into being. They are haphazard, one-off units, and Arkin purposely tries to maintain something of their unintentional form. In the process of constructing the mesh, the different parts are joined together, resulting in a surface that is as imperfect and flawed as the porous face of memory.

The composition of the objects in the gallery emphasizes the notion that a sculpture is more than the sum of its sculptural attributes; it is also constituted by its situation in the space shared by the viewer and by the viewer’s experience of it. The irregularity of the gallery was harnessed to create unusual relations between one work and another, and between the works and the viewers. Each of the pieces has its own enclosed autonomous existence but also interacts with the adjacent work.