Deborah Aschheim’s deep cartography
By IAN PAIGE | February 14, 2007
NEURAL NETWORK: Dreaming in color + black-and-white. |
Consider the countless processes your body is performing in order for you to read these words. Autonomic signals coursing through your body at electric speeds allow you to focus your attention on the printed word instead of your regular breathing and the beating of your heart. Your five senses are receiving enough information right now to fill something like Borges’s Library of Babel, containing every book that ever was and ever will be, and yet your brain decides that the sound of the heating duct does not serve the present moment as much as your cell phone's ringtone. This entire epic adventure of sensory awareness and conscious involvement exists every moment within you and is miraculously stored in your brain as memory and identity, continuity and history.
USM’s visiting artist-in-residence Deborah Aschheim has an innate interest in this subject of memory and its universal applications, along with a healthy dose of fear of its ephemerality. Her voluminous show, entitled “The Forgetting Curve,” at the USM Gallery in Gorham, requires the artist to face the undeniable history of Alzheimer’s disease in the branches of her family tree. Aschheim seeks to externalize structures of memory by creating associative networks on paper and in sculptural video installations. Fueled by an investigation of the mind as both biology and psychology, she performs research experiments on her own recollections in an effort to strengthen cognitive connections and map out a sense of dendritic solidity. Aschheim takes out an insurance policy on remembering by placing her “knowing” outside of her consciousness.
Aesthetic value commingles with the artist’s mining of the self because this quantitative research data forms patterns and meta-patterns when displayed visually. An entire web of psyche is formed such that walking into the gallery gives a sense of pulsing vitality between the pieces. The parts become one.
The first piece that greets the gallery visitor is entitled “The Forgetting Curve,” a term used by cognitive psychologists to describe the way memory decays or is distorted with the passage of time. A matrix of data cards is mounted on the wall. Each card features a small photo in a muted inkjet-color palette and a description of the thoughts and actions of the artist whenever and wherever she was when a beeper she carried randomly sounded. What forms is a voyeuristically inviting account of the artist’s life, specifically during the nascent stages of the show itself.
What is called into question, though, is where this externalized construction of memory falls on the timeline of the forgetting curve. When the artist documents “7:26pm : We’re getting ready to go to dinner” meaning is transmuted by the process of documentation, much like in the brain’s systems of memory. Patterns of meaning develop in cultural forms, supplanting individual experiences in the field of time, only to be experienced individually again as culture or memory in the present moment.
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