Laura Schneider—Subjective Truths
I do most of my creative thinking on a treadmill, Monday to Friday between 5 and 6am. One particular morning, I was going through a mental list of artists whose work I respect when a song with lyrics about memories started playing on my headphones. This is how artist Laura Schneider’s name popped into my head. Of course, her work is about memory.
A few years ago, a serendipitous message led me to Laura’s art. I’ve been a champion of it ever since, and not surprisingly, as her work is emotionally rich. She is a multidisciplinary artist whose work focuses on memories and their limitations and the subjective truths that emerge from them. One of my favorite concepts by her is the Earliest Memory Archive—a collection of anonymous early memories that play back on demand. This work evolved from a simple telephone sculpture that would play back a random memory to the listener into a high-tech looking phone booth that also allowed the listener to record their own memory. I remember when I first interacted with the original iteration of the Earliest Memory Archive (the phone) and the deep effect that listening to those stories had on me, stories that ranged from the rather mundane to the deeply troubling. It led me to sift through my own database of early memories and question the seemingly absolute reality that those memories held.
The concept of memory is also present in her more conventional works (and by conventional I mean drawings, collages and paintings). These pieces are based on old photographs of her family as well as her friends’ families. In these works, her use of color blocking to cover certain parts renders, by default, detailed areas on the remaining parts of the whole—a great parallel for how our own memories hone in on specific aspects of the moment, leaving the rest of it to be perceived as surrounding, loosely identifiable pieces. Effectively, when viewing these works, our central vision is directed to these areas of detail for close examination, while our peripheral vision is afforded the possibility to grasp the rest of the whole with effortless simplicity.
Memories are not kept in one specific part of the brain. Structures like the hippocampus, the amygdala and the neocortex have a role in the storage of memories. In addition, several studies point toward emotion being a powerful aid to the vivid recording of memories. And yet, despite the vividness one might experience when recalling memories, they are not exact records of events. Instead, there is a good amount of bias that becomes assigned to the story; bias dictated by our perception of events at the moment the memory was stored in our brains. This is why Laura’s work refers to the subjective truths that become part of our stories, even blanks that might be filled with information that does not inherently belong to us, perceptions from others that inevitably shape our scope. For example, Laura’s latest work examines, as some studies suggest, the epigenetic phenomenon (modification of the gene expression) that might occur during traumatic events and how those altered genes are passed down to generations below.
