UVA Ruffin Gallery • Feb 24 — Mar 24
Opening Reception • Fri, Feb 24, 5:00pm — 7:00pm
every bit unrending, unreading is a collection of works that examines the tension between that which is archivable and that which is not.
Women in the artist’s family do the labor of preservation, as they hand-wash a quilt made by her great-grandmother, imagining and remembering fragments of its story. Uncertainty surges as faded ink-stains appear on the quilt only after being soaked in water. This collective work is posed alongside a film that imagines the perspective of an archive as it destroys—or erases—itself. Feeling around in the dark, one still senses its presence, but like the edges of burnt paper, it crumbles upon the slightest disturbance. One may only read the traces of memory backward, through absence. The viewer is invited to read the space, its images and its objects, differently, through failure. What remains, and what takes the place of an archive that is itself limiting and limited in how and what it preserves? Generously supported by the UVA Department of Art and the UVA Arts Council.
Anna Hogg is an artist and filmmaker whose work addresses the relationship between memory and the body archive. These investigations extend to the collective feminine that gathers memory, its objects and stories, the relationship between trauma and memory, and the intergenerational archive in contrast to that of the institution. Within these contexts, one finds that the act of remembering and forgetting, preserving and refusing—making into refuse—are often intimately connected, and the boundary that divides them more fluid.