MEMORY PALACE: PAINTINGS

More than 2500 years ago, Simonides of Ceos, a Greek lyric poet, left a banquet just as the building collapsed. The dead were unrecognizable, but Simonides identified the bodies using a visual memory system of the banquet’s seating arrangement. Simonides later developed this into a mnemonic system known as the "memory palace"-- the use of spatial relationships to establish, order and recollect memorial content. I have created my own memory palace. The paintings serve as architectural markers, and large-scale ink drawings describe personal memories. 

These assemblage paintings are constructed using discarded furniture and household objects--a dining room chair, child's playhouse, fireplace mantle, stairway banister. I dismantle the furniture remnants and use them to build new structures. These new structures form the essence of my palace, serving as an ordering system and as mnemonic devices to help me navigate through my palace and find stored memories.