Borrowed Memory

Viviane Silvera

Ratio Gallery is pleased to announce the exhibition “Borrowed Memory” featuring new drawings by Viviane Silvera.

Viviane Silvera’s new drawings investigate themes of time, landscape and memory in a unique blend of Asian atmospherics and western art technique. Based on her childhood in Hong Kong in the 1970’s, the drawings explore the distinctive landscape of Hong Kong – the Aberdeens and Junks, while journeying through the sometimes clear, sometimes cloudy, provocative paths of personal and appropriated memory. Sources include family photographs as well as anonymous photographs of Hong Kong in the same time period.

In her drawings, Silvera brings to the surface the fundamental question of who owns a memory. We tend to think of memory as deeply personal, yet her drawings transcend the individual to capture our collective imagination; an intelligent expression of how the art of remembering transforms an image, and how our memories are shaped by and resurrected by imagery.

Imbued with the mystery of dreams, Silvera’s drawings evoke the question of borrowed memory in a stunning manner. Her brilliant pencil fills each page with intensely cross-hatched lines—a graphic way of competing with the photograph’s capacity for detail. Rendered on toned paper, the white hatching provides both a revelatory light and an obscuring haze; the marks serve to both define and obscure the image. Captivating to both the eye and the mind, these works stay in our memories long after we have stopped viewing them.

The artist lives and works in New York City. She was born in Hong Kong and raised in Brazil. She received her MFA at the New York Academy of Art and is on the faculty at the National Academy School of Fine Arts.

The exhibition will be on view from July 26 – August 30, 2008