Vegetable Memory, an exhibition of time-based works from the Elam School of Fine Arts, opens this Saturday 18 May at The Film Archive and George Fraser Gallery in Auckland. Explains curator Morag Dempsey, the exhibition "seeks to explore the processes of inscribing individual and collective sites of experience through the use of sound and image".

Image: Still from Flora Dominion by Karena Way.Vegetable Memory, an exhibition of time-based works from the Elam School of Fine Arts, opens this Saturday 18 May at The Film Archive and George Fraser Gallery in Auckland. Explains curator Morag Dempsey, the exhibition "seeks to explore the processes of inscribing individual and collective sites of experience through the use of sound and image".

Image: Still from Flora Dominion by Karena Way."The very nature of these technologies, with their ability to record and edit, creates the endless capacity for time and space to be manipulated, broken down and dismantled to allow new configurations to take place. The notion of time as any kind of fixed or constant value is effectively disrupted through the ability of the artist to select and reorder any given reality.

"The way in which these time-based works manipulate the material they deal with can be likened to the human memory, in that they are never simply transcriptions of an event or experience. Instead, they are like a kind of palimpsest, interwoven with layers of both past and present, singular and collective, that are continually being reworked and reformulated through the act itself.

"Memory can be presumed to be a static depiction of a thing past, something that is perceived to have been locked down and ordered by the chronology of time. Yet it is organic in that it possesses an inability to ever fully be contained by the past to which it is said to belong. It is always reformulated at the moment of the act of remembrance itself. It is in a state of constant flux, dependent upon the physical and mental space in which it takes place.

"The works in this exhibition deal with memory. They are documents, records, inscriptions of events whether imagined or real. They act as a kind of technological imprint of the act of memory. This remapping of time allows endless possibilities for the creation of new sites, permitting the insertion of individual associations and subjective experience."

- Morag Dempsey, curator

When: 18 May - 23 June 2007
Where: The Film Archive L1/300 Karangahape Road, Newton, Auckland

When: 22 May - 2 June 2007
Where: George Fraser Gallery, 25A Princes Street, Auckland