This Place We Once Remembered

In an age of reckoning and renegotiation with history, we must also contend with the stubborn resistance that some memories have to being forgotten. In This Place We Once Remembered, artworks and performances by eight former Wave Hill Winter Workspace artists-in-residence draw from lived experience and historical records to conjure memories that move between ancestral pasts and speculative futures. Informed by the tenets of the residency program, the exhibition reflects on Wave Hill as a place where artistic research and development connect nature, culture and site, and where past and present intersect.

Engaging historical places and landscapes as sites of representation, Ariel “Aryel” René Jackson, Dana Levy and Yelaine Rodriguez draw from personal histories, interdisciplinary research, fiction and imagination to contest the historical record. Somatic and performative works by Zachary Fabri, Jodie Lyn-Kee-Chow and Paloma McGregor engage the body’s capacity to carry memory forward and create living archives of ancestral traditions and violent histories. In works that reconcile multiple realities, Saya Woolfalk and Ezra Wube vivify alternative nature-culture possibilities built on non-human-centric values.

Reaching into both the past and future to reframe the present, personal and collective memories intertwine with the trajectory of the Anthropocene in This Place We Once Remembered, acknowledging site as a recollection of physical, historical, cultural and imagined characteristics, which tap into the imperfection and historical manipulation of memory and its transformational power.

This Place We Once Remembered is organized by Rachel Raphaela Gugelberger, Curator of Visual Arts, with Gabriel de Guzman, Director of Arts and Chief Curator; Betsey Perlmutter, Curator of Performing Arts; and Cecilia Lu, Curatorial Assistant.