Artists Carlos DeMedeiros and Perri Neri evoke notions of meaning and memory differently in their art making practice. They will be leading a panel discussion to further explore the way artists dive into and transform memory in the work they create.

Memories can slipthrough us and onto the frontiers of consciousness, endlessly shifting shape and meaning. They lurk between the words we speak and the feelings we manifest. The problematics of identity, belonging, and forgetting, are rooted in past and present memory. Future memories find their place through transformation, change, and revolution. Artist have always been the cultural scribes and memory is a rather magical human trait. Body memory, diasporic memory, collective memory, and yes, the impermanence of memory, are threads that an artist tugs at and weaves into the metaphorical fabric of their work.

Through a variety of repurposed obiects, DeMedeiros highlights fluidity and rootedness, memories of a past life intertwined with the present. His materials are obiects he collects from his surroundings. He is widening the conversation, both in the transformative way he uses those material and in the fact that they have their own memories and histories.

Perri Neri is a figurative painter interested in how bodies hold memories, how they respond to a memory. This exploration has pushed hert o paint through her own body, past the surface to find some kind of truth about what it feels like to be vulnerable, to be aroused, to be injured, to heal, etc. "I work on the raw side of the canvas." Neri explains, "It holds the mark like a memory."