Bernadette Mayer’s Memory | Memory as VariousTime & Space Limited, Sunday, April 21st at 2 p.m.
events, 03/12/24
detail from July 23, 1971 in Memory by Bernadette Mayer
To celebrate Siglio’s new printing of Bernadette Mayer’s Memory, Time & Space Limited is screening a special moving-image presentation of Memory (created for the Museum of Modern Art in 2019) on Sunday, April 21 at 2 p.m.
In July 1971, Bernadette Mayer embarked on an experiment: For one month she shot a roll of 35mm each day and kept a journal. The result was a conceptual work—comprised of over 1100 photographs and two hundred pages of text—that investigates the nature of memory, its surfaces, textures and material. Memory elicits the mercurial, fleeting consciousness of the present moment from which memory is—as Mayer writes—“always there, to be entered, like the world of dreams or an ongoing TV show.”
Excerpting Mayer’s original 1972 audio with images from the book, this 35-minute iteration of Memory projects her voice, language and eye on screen for a very different sensory experience. Additionally, Mayer’s daughter Marie Warsh will elucidate Memory and its shapeshifting since 1972. Warsh will also converse with Grace Murphy who was witness to, participant in, and a subject of Mayer’s experimental record, in order to plumb Memory, “memory” and memories.
TSL is located at 434 Columbia St, Hudson, NY 12534. Tickets $10 / members $8. More about Mayer and Memory here.
Can’t get upstate? Join us for our celebratory reading in Brooklyn.
detail from July 22, 1971 in Memory by Bernadette Mayer
Marie Warsh is a historian, writer, and the co-director of the Estate of Rosemary Mayer. She has helped to organize numerous exhibitions of Mayer’s work and has edited several books, including Excerpts from the 1971 Journal of Rosemary Mayer (2016 & 2020), Temporary Monuments: Work by Rosemary Mayer, 1977-1982 with Max Warsh (2018), and The Letters of Bernadette and Rosemary Mayer with Gillian Sneed (2022). She is also the deputy director at Soft Network, an emerging non-profit organization focused on artist legacies.
Grace Murphy has been variously employed as a freelance writer, health care administrator, educational consultant, computer programmer, college teacher, psychotherapist, and cook. She and Bernadette began their lifelong friendship when they were both students at St. Saviour High School and found that they had each won their respective borough’s competitions for writing a “Little Miss Hot Spot” essay on fire prevention.
see also
Events
Reading from MemoryUnnameable Books, Saturday, April 13 at 6 p.m.
Excerpts
About Bernadette MayerMarie Warsh
Events
Language Is a TemptationOnline at Poets House, New York CityA reading everyday in July 2020 of Bernadette Mayer’s Memory
Excerpts
An Excerpt from Memory: July 15, 1971Bernadette Mayer
✼ natalie’s upstate weather report:
April 11, 2024 — The spring peepers have thawed (these little frogs freeze in winter) and now, unabashedly randy, they chirp. At first there was one, then two, and now it sounds like thousands. Two days ago, when it was truly spring, their adamantine chorus was almost deafening (we closed the windows to simply think!). Siglio has relocated to a lush, thriving hollow at the furthest most edge of the Berkshires after two years of peripatetics, sans library—which is now unpacked in a less than Benjaminian manner (little time to contemplate—our urgency in getting books on shelves mirrored the peepers need to mate). The first few months of 2024 were almost unendurable, but we’re home, spring is here, and there are books to made. We are singing!
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