Community Art Event 1: SFSU

A couple Thursdays ago I took the elevator down to the second floor of the Fine Arts building and walked around the gallery which was displaying the works of MFA students. The Masters of Fine Arts Thesis Exhibition included the works of Bren Ahearn, Jeff Ray, Taryn McCabe, Luke Damiani, Matt Kennedy, Holly Williams and Aaron Granich.
I was immediately interested in Matt Kennedy's work, which at face value consists of multiple blown up prints of geographic locations. I was particularly drawn to them because of their depiction of rocks with "rings", layers of various rocks, sand and settiment which builds up over time. Like growth rings on a tree, these layers give me a sense of time, the past, history. Plus they were black and white and grainy looking, which appeals to my aesthetic sensibilities. I come to read they are depictions of "natural events associated with an impending earthquake". Sounds pretty interesting, snapshots of bizarre happenings during earthquakes? I would have liked to hear him speak about his ideas on this.
Speaking that day was Jeff Ray. His multimedia display incorporates sound, smell, photography, drawings and model sculptures of buildings. He called it an "exploration of the phenomenology of sound, of dwellings, and beyond". Walking into the curtained space I immediately heard the music-like, field recordings which were looped to give an ephemeral effect. To me it came off a bit reflective, or meditative and got me thinking of memory, which was a theme he had touch on in his talk about his work, which had a lot more to do with architecture than I was picking up on. I saw three walls with blown-up photographs on them and model buildings in front of them. Some of the photos were drawn on, like sketching out other buildings into the landscape or adding grid lines. They got me thinking about how photographs can capture something like a building and how I might remember the building if I didn't have the picture. I thought the models were scaled, 3-d versions of the buildings from memory, since they looked different than the pictures, but similar enough in shape to make the association. I continued to trip out on the idea of how memory rewrites itself every time we recall something; or according to some articles I've read, we remember the same things differently, say an event, every time we recall them. It's like six degrees of separation, only we do it with ourselves. Which is great if you actually want to change your memory of an event. Like keeping a picture of a past lover put away as a gauge for when you've changed your memory enough to move on.
I guess buildings can hold memories as well. I still have jubbled dreams of places I've lived. Recently, I had a dream of buying a house with my girlfriend down the street from where we rent, only it was in the neighborhood I grew up in, 400 + miles away. The house was very specific in my mind, and I know a house exists in that actual neighborhood, but probably not the way I dreamt it. I guess this might tie into the ideas of utopia that Jeff talks about in the reader from the show, creating our own utopias and dystopias from our memories. That house would have been across the street from a park I visited a lot as a kid and have good memories of, and they just got better? Weird to think my idea of a utopia is owning an imagined house and a childhood park, only up north to where I live now. Now I just need to create a source of income and save some money for the next 10 years, enter dystopia.
Over all I liked most of the works in the SFSU gallery. I'll have to remember to go in there more often.