“Memory is that of the body that passed; memory is the trace of a wave goodbye made with a slightly clenched fist.” - Robert Morris
Positioning itself between the practices of expanded cinema, performance, and meditative listening, A Memory Held in You, curated by Allegra Hangen and Alex Jacobsen is an immersive virtual installation that examines how what we see, hear, and feel is woven into the fabric of a remembered experience.
In a series of digital events staged across social media platforms and Amplify Arts’ website each week beginning May 8th - June 19th, Allegra Hangen (@allegrahangen) and Alex Jacobsen (@xelajacobsen), in collaboration with Gayle Rocz (@sparklyfrenchfry), Isabella Starkey Meier (@isabella_sm_), and Jay Kreimer collectively bring into the question the legitimacy of cognitive hierarchies by conscripting video, sound, and prerecorded performance into an audio-visual lexicon that fragments memory’s factual accuracy.
Could a “better” memory be held in our devices, in the files we share with each other, in a collective mediated experience in isolation? Maybe a “better” memory isn’t a sharper or more exact one. Maybe a “better” memory is held in impressions left behind by echoing vibration, mediation, or fleeting gestures embodied for only a second.
To inaugurate the virtual exhibition, dancers Gayle Rocz and Isabella Starkey Meier will be performing in A Memory Held in You through prerecorded videos on Instagram and Facebook Live Friday, May 8th at 9pm.
Free and open to all. This exhibition is presented with the support of the Nebraska Arts Council and the Nebraska Cultural Endowment.
About the Artists:
Allegra Hangen is a photographer, experimental video maker, and video installation artist residing in Omaha, NE. She received her BFA in Photography from the Art Institute of Boston (currently Lesley University College of Art and Design) in 2014, and her MA in 2019 from the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México in Mexico City. In 2018, she exhibited two solo shows in Mexico City and has been part of various international group exhibitions and film festivals in cities like Boston, Oaxaca City, Mexico City, Vancouver, Buenos Aires, Aguascalientes, among others. Her video work focuses mainly on memory, family archives, media representation and the dynamics between the political and the intimate.
Alex Jacobsen is a sound artist based in Omaha, NE, whose audio work focuses on the plasticity of sound and aims to connect us with environments and situations that exist outside of our current temporal-spatial experiences. He received his Bachelor of Music from the University of Nebraska at Kearney in 2016. He has interned at Evergroove Studios in 2016 and with artist in residence, Marc Vilanova, in 2019 at the Bemis Center for Contemporary Arts. Within the past year, he has shown his sculptural sound pieces at Red Eye and Confluence in Lincoln, NE and at Konvent in Barcelona, Spain, where he was also on residency.
Jay Kreimer is a musician, instrument maker, sculptor, composer and educator. More to the point, he is an alchemist of hardware stores, surplus catalogs, and discarded objects, who assembles new things out of scraps of possibility. Kreimer has performed across Europe, including Dublin, Cork, London, Glasgow, Berlin, Amsterdam and Paris, and played at D-22 in Beijing. He presented an interactive talk/performance at the 2008 ISIM conference in Denver, and Santa Cruz. In collaboration with Wendy Weiss, he has shown sound and sculptural work in Beijing, San Francisco, Vancouver, New York, Washington D.C, and showed a major installation in Kansas City and Tulsa. He spent the winter of 2009 in Vadodara, India, rewiring neuromuscular circuits by studying tabla. Kreimer also performs with The Mighty Vitamins and Seeded Plain.
Gayle Rocz is a senior at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln who will graduate with a Bachelor of Arts in both Dance and English in August 2020. She was born and raised in Omaha, Nebraska, where she danced at various studios before moving to Lincoln to pursue modern dance at a collegiate level. Gayle has performed in the annual Student Dance Project (2016-2019) and Evenings of Dance (2017-2020). She has also performed in the American College Dance Association’s (ACDA) Gala Performances in the Spring of 2018 and 2019. Gayle has worked with multiple esteemed dance artists while at UNL, including: Jenna Riegel, Kayvon Pourazar, Dan Schuchart, Lauren Simpson, and Jennifer Nugent. Gayle has choreographed and premiered three recent works related to concepts surrounding the representation of dance in popular culture: Siwa-nator (2018), Save Your Tears for the Pillow (2020), and Queens? (2020).
Isabella Starkey Meier is a sophomore Dance Major at University of Nebraska-Lincoln. Prior to dancing at the collegiate level Isabella started modern dance at age 15 and was awarded the Nebraska Young Artist Award in Dance her junior year of high school. Isabella was a part of Nebraska Contemporary Dance Theatre from 2015-2017 working with choreographers such as Jessica Miller Tomlinson, Eddy Ocampo and Noelle Bohaty. With NCDT Isabella traveled to Chicago, IL and Phoenix, AZ to attend and perform at Regional Dance America Festivals. At the University of Nebraska-Lincoln Isabella has worked with student, faculty and guest choreographers such as Melissa Templeton, Hye-Won Hwang and Lauren Simpson. She also has performed in Adjudicated and informal showings at American Collegiate Dance Association (2019). Isabella has performed in two and choreographed in one Student Dance Projects (2018-2019) and performed in Evenings of Dance show at University of Nebraska-Lincoln (2019).