360 ARTS

'The Lining of Forgetting'

Thematic exhibit of contemporary art reminds us what we're forgetting

By Jeanne Claire van Ryzin
AMERICAN-STATESMAN ARTS WRITER
Thursday, June 25, 2009

Our 24-hour digital onslaught of data and information makes for a lot to remember these days. And a lot to forget.

Yes, plenty of technological advances make it possible for us to digitally store and access all that information. But the irony of our information age is that all that artificial memory makes it easier, and more justifiable, for to us forget. Our contemporary conundrum of memory and forgetting is at the heart of `The Lining of Forgetting,' a comely little group of exhibits of contemporary art now on view at the Austin Museum of Art.

Organized by curator Xandra Eden and on loan from the Weatherspoon Art Museum in North Carolina, `The Lining of Forgetting,' like most thematic exhibits, sometimes feels didactic. But when individual works of art resonate, they resonate strongly.

Take, Cody Trepte's `Photo Album.' Some 75 black-bound books line two shelves on the gallery wall, each one with text plate on the front describing a family photograph. But take a volume down and a flip through the pages and you encounter page after page of ones and zeroes, or binary code. There's nothing more sentimental than a family photograph. But today's reality of all those precious moments we snap with our digital cameras is that they mostly exist as virtual files of bytes, not as dog-eared photographs that can be lovingly paged through.

Dinh Q. Le offers a much more sober consideration of the meaning of photographic information. Born in Vietnam, Le escaped with his family at the end of the Vietnam War and settled in Southern California. Now, he creates giant woven photographs - much like traditional Vietnamese woven grass mats - entwining black-and-white archival news photographs of the war with glamor-drenched stills from Hollywood movies like `Apocalypse Now.' The blur is startling and needles away at pop culture's power to gloss over the ugly side of realities.

Less dark but equally critical of pop culture is Mungo Thomson's `The American Desert (For Chuck Jones).' Thomson took `Road Runner' cartoon footage and digitally erased any visual and aural hint of the central characters and their wacky antics. Instead, we get the weird Technicolor version of the landscape of the American Southwest as created by Warner Brothers animator Chuck Jones.

So that's the image of the stylized, color-saturated American West that got so embedded in the minds of generations of children who grew up watching the `Road Runner' cartoons - the image that unconsciously informs how with think of the American landscape?

Wonder how many of us had forgotten that?

jvanryzin@statesman.com; 445-3699

'The Lining of Forgetting: Internal and External Memory in Art'

When: 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. Tuesdays- Fridays, 10 a.m. to 8 p.m. Thursdays, 10 a.m. to 6 p.m. Saturdays, noon to 5 p.m. Sundays, through Aug. 9.

Where: Austin Museum of Art, 823 Congress Ave.

How much: $5. $4 for seniors, students or military $4, 12 and younger free.

Info: 495-9224, www.amoa.org

'The Spider, the Mistress and the Tangerine'

What: Documentary on artist Louise Bourgeois (featured in above exhibit). Introduced by Austin artist Margo Sawyer.

When: 6 Thursday

Tickets: Free with museum admission ($4-$5)