Memory Machines

Memory Machines

December 6 - 22
Main Gallery

Opening Reception
First Thursday, December 6, 6-10pm

Memory Machines | Alicia Eggert (Portland)
Installation

Memory Machines is an installation based on the visual incarnation of the process of thought and our minds attempt at capturing and holding these thoughts and memories. Using post-it notes as a physical holder of these thoughts, Alicia has constructed an installation of little yellow birds (two post-it notes stuck together) fluttering above and around three birdcages that represent the three areas of the brain (fore, mid and hindbrain) and their functions. Alicia’s voice streams out of the birdcages; each cage reciting the written text on the post it notes. One cage with detailed thoughts, dreams and memories, one cage with random facts and information and the other with bodily functions that the brain controls without conscious thought or action.

Memory Machines began as an absurd attempt by the artist to capture all of the information housed within the electrically activated hunk of raw meat that is her brain. Over the course of a year and a half, she documented her thoughts, ideas, feelings, dreams and memories on thousands of small yellow Post-it notes. These notes are now an incarnation of the artist’s subconscious, little yellow birds that form a flock of thought and soar high above the cages that wish to contain them.

Alicia Eggert was born in New Jersey and spent 4 years of her early childhood living in Cape Town, South Africa, where her parents were missionaries during the apartheid. She earned a bachelors degree in Interior Design from Drexel University in Philadelphia, and is currently pursuing an MFA in Sculpture/Dimensional Studies from the New York State College of Ceramics at Alfred University. She moved to Portland in 2005, where she formed a contemporary art organization that produces interdisciplinary public art events, known as Kitchen Sink PDX. Her work is inspired by the habits and objects found within everyday life.

Left: All My Clothes, Valentine's Cafe, 2006