THROUGH THE MEMORY ATLAS: 40 YEARS OF COLLECTING

Central Gallery
July 14 to September 15, 2018

Curated by Roger Boulet, Jen Budney, Susan Edelstein, Adrienne Fast, Andrew Hunter, Charo Neville, Jordan Strom and Tania Willard

In celebration of the Kamloops Art Gallery’s 40th anniversary, Through the Memory Atlas: 40 Years of Collecting, gathers together the most comprehensive selection of works from its permanent collection in one exhibition to date. This exhibition is a unique opportunity to bring a large and diverse group of works, in various media, out from storage and into public view. The exhibition title and curatorial framework pay homage to the German art historian and cultural theorist Aby Warburg, who founded a private library for Cultural Studies that organized and classified the legacy of Western culture in an experimental, non-logical and non-conventional manner. His project has worked to inspire and inform many contemporary artists today. Warburg’s Mnemosyne Atlas constituted cosmographic and art historical images arranged non-chronologically to reveal the ways in which subjective and objective forces shape our understanding of Western culture. His juxtaposition of “information constellations” attempted to make sense of the overwhelming process of historical change, creating what he called “thought space” (Denkraum), rather than a definitive archive.