Art Gallery

The gallery Canada in the Lower East Side held an exhibition for Bernadette Mayer’s Memory so I went to go see it for my Writing I class. When I got there all I saw was a big room with two benches in the middle, a wall of photographs, and two speakers on either side of the benches playing some sort of narrative by Bernadette Mayer. I don’t know what I was expecting but this definitely wasn’t it. Memory is a piece where Mayer photographs one month in her life. At first I didn’t really get it because it was arranged so that the different days were separated by a card that said what day it was. But I realized this once I looked closer at the photos. Then I really started to understand them. They were snapshots of Mayer’s activities throughout the day. Most of the photos weren’t focused on anything in particular and a lot of them were blurry, reminding of impressionistic art more specifically Monet paintings. In these painting if you look closely the brushstrokes look random but when you take a step back and see the bigger picture, everything starts to make sense. Mayer’s Memory is a lot like that but at the same time the exact opposite if that. While for Monet paintings you need to step back to understand, for Mayer’s Memory looking at the details and the individual photos make it easier to understand the meaning behind the piece.