Recollection: Memories as collections of images painted through time by Jill Falk

This exhibit by Northwestern Artist, Jill Falk is comprised of several collections of evocative monochromatic paintings made over the last five years in Portland, Lincoln City, and Southern Oregon, as well as a site-specific video installation. It explores how images we hold onto as memory become anchors for particular states or feeling spaces we occupy at different times in our lives.

Jill says,” Memory, I think, is its own kind of painting. We build and alter memories every time we touch them (that’s what the neuroscience says!). The building of a memory, to me, is so tangential to my process of painting, the way the ground is built with layers of paint and information, the image laid in, removed, repositioned, repainted, re-collected. The images I use for reference in my work generally come from still shots of television and film, old family photos (my own family and others), as well as my own personal photographic archives. The final paintings become a mesh of my own “actual” memories and memory captured through the lens of another and imprinted onto me, to be recollected later in my own memory banks. I get curious about how the images we hold as the past become our reference for the passage of time and reality itself. Without memory I’m not even sure if time exists, exactly.”  

These paintings vary in scope from abstraction to higher levels of image rendering, much like a memory or a dream, some parts are clearer or more fully represented than others. This work is mostly focused on the feeling state of memory and less with ‘accuracy’ of an event. 

 I see these different formats as holding space to consider the experience and the process of recollection. Sometimes we hold a single image large and feel enveloped by it, sometimes memory feels like a series of single images read like a film, and sometimes (like the science says) memory and image feel simultaneous, quantum, like the grids. I foresee the video installation as maybe mimicking the style of the paintings (through my edits). I feel as though all of the work that I do as an artist is painting- So, to me, the video work is also painting. I used videos from my archive and collections and incorporated video imagery from the Lincoln City area as a way to help place the viewer in the work and make the show more specific to itself.” 

There will be an opening reception from 5:00 to 7:00 pm on Friday, February 3rd, with a virtual gallery tour on Facebook posted on Saturday the 4th, @lincolncityculture