Gallery 2
Wendy Dawes
11 June - 27 June 2021
fold/unfold is an opportunity for Wendy Dawes to explore the nature and fallibility of memory, both individual and collective. By placing pages that have been torn from books into boxes, Dawes disorders and renders unreadable, expressing the volatile and interdependent nature of memory.
Throughout the pandemic of 2020 Dawes began folding boxes out of pages torn from books. In Paper Machine, French Philosopher Jacques Derrida states that βpaper is the support not only for marks but for a complex βoperationβ β spatial, and temporal, visible; tangible, and often sonorous; active but also passive (something other than an βoperationβ, then, the becoming-opus or the archive of operative work).β In this sense, fold/unfold allows for a considered reflection on the tensions of being and becoming.
Image: Wendy Dawes, the failure of memory iv (detail), 2020. Mixed media, 50 x 75 x 2 cm. Courtesy of the artist.