Too Much to Carry
September 7-October 5, 2024
Mana Mehrabian, an Iranian artist living in Eastern Washington, and Seattle-based artist Mary Coss investigate personal and ancestral migrations through sculpture and installation art.
Curatorial Statement: On Migration
This exhibition is the next in our 2024 series, Time is the Subject. In this show, we find that the subject is singular plural, extending over generations and places. The subject is fragile, able to carry only so much. The subject is embodied, and the body holds memories for only so long. We engage material to preserve memory – compiling photographs and files, and passing on keepsakes, clothing, artifacts. And yet these materials fail us.
Mehrabian and Coss each examine migration and memory from a different time of life, a difference distance from the migratory event, from a different cultural history. Mehrabian chose to immigrate in our difficult, politically fraught contemporary context. Coss’s ancestors were forced to immigrate more than a century ago. Both artists long to connect with their lost places and people. The artists hold up objects and search them like faces; hold up images of faces and make objects to honor them. But they can’t bring the past into the present; it is too much to carry into their own lives and go forward.
In each case, neither writing, traditional photography, digital photography or archiving can hold all the memories. Yet the body carries through. Embodied memory – recollection through touch, action, smell – connects them to the artists to their personal and ancestral past. Hanging a photo on the wall, repotting a plant brough from another home – these acts can bring back memories as when a pianist sits at the piano and notes come to their hands. A musician might actively call to mind a score or a set of chords. Often, to remember a piece, the player plays. Through touch, the player recalls the patterns. It is often through embodied memory like this that we connect with our past; we can’t choose when these memories come up or which memories, positive or negative, come to hand.
Recollection is always a re-collection from moving water. Some leaves float away. Rocks drift. Moss and salt stain. Keepsakes break. We recall both the original thing and the way it has been changed.
This body of work is informed by the experience of moving between two cultures and places — unpacking both physically and emotionally while navigating feelings of longing and belonging. It recalls sorting through mementos when things are out of place and in the process of finding their place.
The project incorporates ordinary objects and materials of daily life that transport, hold, protect, and store our keepsakes, belongings, and memories. Empty, detached photo frames cast in cement echo the effort to carry and piece together fragments of the past and integrate them into the present. Childhood photographs framed with cement are placed in storage, showing part of the complete picture and keeping the whole image obscure. Designs and motifs from historical architectural sites in Iran are cut into the frame corner protectors, marking impersonal and mundane materials with a sense of place. The work reflects on the constant construction, deconstruction, and fragmentation of memory and identity through time and places.
Mehrabian is an interdisciplinary artist, born in Tehran, Iran, and currently living and working in eastern Washington. Her work centers on perception, identity, memory, migration, and the body — as well as the mediation of these themes through photography . She works across various media, centering on photography, video, and installation. Her work has been exhibited at venues such as the Vestibule (Seattle, WA), Cascade Paragon Gallery (Portland, OR), Saranac Art Projects (Spokane, WA), CICA Museum (Gimpo, South Korea), Currents New Media 2021 (Santa Fe, NM), and featured in publications such as Friend of The Artist and Into the Clouds: New Media Art 2021. She is a recipient of the 2022 Artist Trust Grants for Artists' Progress (GAP). In parallel to her work as an artist, she works as an artist-curator and educator. She received her MFA from Washington State University, where she currently teaches.
My writings explore my foremothers lives and question how we reclaim and preserve these lost memories. The stories manifest throughout the sculpture, drawings and installations and fully in the zine. Using bronze and salt I play with materials that are both transitional and enduring. This story is in process as is life. Just like the stories, some imagery will disappear through time while other objects last. Similar to our changing memories, objects cast in salt and plaster wear away, stories written in wire rust while cast metal objects live on.
Shown here as a wall ripped from my studio, are the sketches, thoughts and work that evolved through my discovery process. Just as my family crossed the water and the stories move through time and space, my work transverses cultural boundaries to touch our common stories, familial relationships and shared humanity.
A core sample is an analysis of layers of sediment, looking at substance and significance and observing how these layers transform through time. Similar to a geologic core sample, I have researched the layers of my foremothers history as a path to understand my place in this world.
Coss is an interdisciplinary artist creating installations that explore culture through allegory. Born in Detroit and based in Seattle, she received an MFA from Syracuse University. Awards and grants include NEA, SOLA, Ford and Puffin Foundations, 4Culture, Seattle Arts, Artist Trust and the ACLU. Her Public Art ranges from large scale commissions to local social engagement. The award winning sculpture Ghost Log, featured on the Tacoma waterfront, was built through her collaborative process working with community. International residencies and exchanges include Canada, Italy, Ireland, Guatemala, Sweden, and Turkey. She is co-founder of METHOD Gallery.
October 5th join us for a two-part event:
1 pm Reading of fiction, poetry and memoire exploring migration with readings by Shahrzad Shams director of Iranian cultural organization Peyvand, local Iranian fiction writer Siamak Vossoughi, poet and activist Merna Hecht, and artists Mary Coss and Mana Mehrabian.
3 pm Artist Talk by Coss and Mehrabian
Photos courtesy of Stefan Gonzales (exhibition), Jane Speelers (Coss details) and Mana Mehrabian (artist’s work).