The Art Center Highland Park is proud to exhibit Postmemory, a new series of paintings by artist Nicole Gordon.
Inspired by intimate interviews with her parents about their family history of immigration and assimilation from Eastern Europe to South Africa, Cuba, and ultimately to the United States, this show contemplates issues of personal lived experience and how memories that are uncomfortable or traumatic are processed.
“Postmemory,” is a word coined by Marianne Hirsch that describes— “the relationship that the “generation after” bears to the personal, collective, and cultural trauma of those who came before.” For this series, Gordon pulls imagery from both her own memory and her parents’ and grandparents’ records of history. The scenes depicted are hyperreal dreamscapes that juxtapose the actual with the metaphorical, and the observed with the imagined. The Art Center Highland Park 1957 Sheridan Rd, Highland Park, IL 60035 Half of the paintings in this series are inspired by Gordon’s mother, who was forced to flee Cuba for the United States as a teenager during the Cuban Revolution. The other half of the series was inspired by her father, who was born and raised in South Africa and who’s anti-apartheid views made it impossible for him to stay. Each painting from the series about her mother has a corresponding painting about her father that hangs side-by-side. While the details within the compositions of the paintings are unique, the layout of the corresponding paintings shares similarities. This illustrates the uniqueness of her parents' family stories, told within the shared framework of Jewish history from all over the world.
Postmemory will open with a free public reception at The Art Center Highland Park on Friday, February 28 from 5:30 p.m. to 8:00 p.m., and will run through Saturday, April 5. Viewing is available during gallery hours: Monday through Saturday, 10 AM till 4 PM, and by special arrangement. In the same exhibition period, The Art Center will also show Memory is a Verb: Exploring Time and Transience, an exhibition that brings together ten women photographic artists exploring the liminal space between time and transience. Like Postmemory, this body of work represents the universal concepts of loss, mortality, and legacy, and the exploration of what inspires us to seek solace and reexamine our histories.
