"Mother Memory" (Art Exhibit Installment Series, Introduction)
Toti O’Brien
Editor’s Note: This is the introduction to a nine-part art essay series on an art exhibit curated by the author. Oyster River Pages is pleased to publish these essays weekly starting July 1.
Mother Memory is an art exhibit that will open at Wonzimer (Los Angeles, Lincoln Heights) on August 15, 2025, and will close on September 12. A related poetry-and-performance event will take place on August 22, 7:00 p.m. to 9:00 p.m. The exhibit will include a selection of work from nine artists. The event will showcase the work of seven poets and three performers.
I chose the title Mother Memory based on its ambiguity. Each artist or poet could, in theory, focus her response on either term. Technically, here memory is the noun, and mother the attribute — like in Mother Goose, Mother Bear, Mother Courage, Mother Theresa... Memory, our mother, our matrix. In which ways does memory mother us? In which measure does it create us, contributing to determine who we are and what we do? Does it nurture us? Protect us? Can it heal us? Can it instruct and guide us?
Most native English speakers, though, hear these words as “Memory of Mother.” They hear Mother’s Memory. The possessive, as we know, isn’t always needed... see, for instance, car door, bedroom window, school teacher... Memor(ies) of (my) Mother — that is how the majority of the artists and poets I invited to the show interpreted the call. Almost all did — though someone added variations to their proposed selection — and I expected this to happen, as we are hardwired to flag up a few key items/concepts, Mother being one of them.
Still, several creators proposed work related to their mothers and something else, catching on the ambivalence of the call. Some expanded the theme to memories of myself as a mother (memories of my own motherhood). Others stretched the concept of motherhood to one of multigenerational legacy and ancestry. Others brought in echoes of motherland and mother tongue. Others shifted towards the elemental rather than human level, and reflected onto the past and future of our Mother Earth.
Finally, some emphasized their mother’s memory, not their memories of her. Alzheimer is a problem of our times. Many have witnessed first hand the cognitive decline of a parent, with its many side effects. Many have written or made art about it. I was interested in understanding the ramifications of this experience—how our mother’s loss of memory affects our recollections—in particular, how factors of cultural, geographical, language displacement may intersect this journey through erasure and vanishing.
The show wasn’t an open call. I invited artists and poets whose work, in my opinion, could significantly relate to the chosen theme under a variety of angles. Artists and poets whose work is layered, overlapped, stratified — hence, inherently embedding ideas of time and past. Whose work implies techniques of painstaking, minute reconstruction, with the whole slowly emerging from a patient gathering of fragments. Whose work demonstrates a strong awareness of interconnection between things and beings — or else an awareness of the ephemeral, frail nature of the human experience. I chose artists and poets whose work poignantly addressed family ties, and some who brought in echoes of historical and geographical drifts—those crevices into which memory slips and gets lost—those chasms that only memory can mend.
For this series, I am pairing artists and authors in loose, open fashion. Each installment, released weekly in Oyster River Pages Soundings beginning July 1, will showcase an image and a poem, accompanied by a brief presentation of both the artist and poet. The performers involved in Mother Memory will be included as well.
