“Our memory is not made for the past, but for the future”.
—Roland Benoit
Spectral Lines announces its sixth exhibition, Immemorial, featuring photographic works by Leigh Davis and a video by Michelle Levy.
January 27- April 6, 2024
Opening: January 27th 4-7pm
Immemorial delves into our intricate psychological connections with the birth and death cycle through photographs, videos, collages, and film. Davis and Levy focus our awareness on human connection through morphic fields, utilizing the influence of our perception of the spaces between the past, present, and future. In their extensive interdisciplinary exploration, they navigate familial constellations across timelines, directing us toward the concept of quantum entanglement. The works in the exhibition are an invitation to step into both artists' ancestral practices and join them on intimate journeys of human interconnections that intersect through research, memory, and embodiment.
After an unusual and profound event following the death of her father, interdisciplinary artist Leigh Davis began building a body of work exploring end-of-life experiences. Feeling Tones acts as a media repository, where future memories are captured, collected, stored, and retrieved to translate intangible experiences into more permanent, shareable forms. With a particular focus on how abstraction, imagery, and non-linear narrative help us process discomfort and imagine decisions based on assumptions about our lives and deaths, the project invites others to feel into and share experiences of embodied memory, a process complicated by the uncertainty of death.
The collection of collages/photographs on view stems from Davis' image archive, built over 20 years. The archive is a form of reorganizing according to Davis' own taxonomy. Creating this collection allows a reinvesting into past and present images to create a new kind of visual language.
For the past seven years, artist and storyteller Michelle Levy has been immersed in an expanding art/life work shaped by twists and turns of events, accidental meetings, and unexpected discoveries. While trying to repair voids in her matrilineage, Levy's life became unexpectedly intertwined with the story of a stranger, a Polish Jewish woman named Paulina. In the fall of 2018, Levy left her home and job to move to Poland to investigate the 1945 wartime testimony of this supposed ancestor, who lost her family and survived on her own throughout Nazi-occupied Poland. The heart of Michelle's investigation was a road trip with her Polish counterpart, Patrycja, a Polish-Jewish "midwife" to untold stories, retracing Paulina's wartime path. Their plans went beautifully off-track when a series of strange errors and coincidences led to a veritable confrontation with the dead. In this evolving performance – culminating as a film – Levy takes the audience on her journey between the US and Poland, the past, present, and future, to share how one woman's story, decades after death, changed the course of her life.
For Immemorial, Levy shows a short video sequence offered as a gesture toward her feature-length film, which is currently in production. A woven story of past events plays in an independent loop throughout the exhibition. At the same time, the unfolding tales of the present and future are shared personally by the artist in several live events.
