RAIR | 2009-10

Petra Soesemann

Petra Soesemann earned her BFA from the Cleveland Institute of Art and her MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. In addition to RAiR, Petra has been a resident at the Lucid Art Foundation in California and the Fundacion Valparaiso in Spain. Petra has an ongoing interest in the relationships among aesthetic expression and the various states of human consciousness. She explores pattern, repetition and color to discover visual relationships that emerge from states of mindfulness. This allows abstract concepts to link to pattern and structure, generating visual forms that link the universal and the particular.

My recent work explores textile surfaces that both obscure and reveal. Fabric constructions often incorporate translucent and opaque areas that bring perception into conflict with expectation and uncertainty, and engage the basic processes of mind seeking meaning as a process of consciousness.

For some time now I've been interested in the notion of the memory palace. In the Greek art of rhetoric, the memory palace was an imagined architectural space furnished with objects that were linked to concepts. As the orator mentally moved through her memory palace, the visualized space and furnishings would guide her through key speaking points. The concept of the memory palace intrigues me on several levels: the nature of visualization and spatial thinking; the linking of abstract concept to image; visual forms that mediate between the universal and the particular; the curiosity of breaching time through the act of recollection; and how the nuances of present experience reframe memory.

Many of my works from the past few years are conceived as components of one extensive installation that ironically will never be seen in its entirety because the memory palace is perpetually in progress: projected, dismantled and then conjured again through a changing assemblage of artifacts.

Roswell Museum and Art Center 

RAiR Exhibition • Petra Soesemann “Artifacts from the Memory Palace”• September 19 - November 8, 2009