Mieke Uhryniuk-Smith
on Misremembering Space: Vacant Bodies by Nicole Jones and Lailey Newton
Architecture and other aspects of the built environment are an integral part of daily life, shaping its quality and trajectory in obvious and subtle ways. It is not surprising that the places people occupy and move through feature prominently in memories, literally setting the stage for recollections. Lailey Newton and Nicole Jones’ show Misremembering Spaces: Vanishing Bodies uses painting to engage with the relationship of architecture to memory, demonstrating the processes through which memories lose detail, context, and otherwise break down when they lose their grounding in place.
In Newton’s work, structures with no clear purpose are adrift in voids of solid colour. Each structure is covered in a different image as if by wallpaper; these images are warped by the dimensions of the planes on which they are projected. In one painting, a paper-thin building resembling a shed is covered in imagery of a concrete stairwell, its patchy walls dappled with shadows cast by distorted railings and doorways. In another, darkly coloured wedges coated with what looks like a map of a coastline recede into a field of searing fluorescent red.
Jones’ paintings feature houses rendered in bright vibrant hues covered in panels of solid colour and areas of pattern reminiscent of vintage textiles and wallpaper. Some of these patterns are recognizable and specific, such as the brown-green foliage of the hunter’s camouflage that covers the exterior of a small house in one of the paintings. Flames spill out of the house’s four windows and pale grey smoke from the chimney looms over the small structure. Another painting features a house adorned with the stylized roads and buildings of a child’s play mat, which stretches across its surface alongside planes of soft, pale yellow.
While the artists’ paintings are each immediately distinct in style, both Newton and Jones’ work is characterized by flatness in certain ways. While Newton’s buildings themselves are painted to imply placement in three-dimensional space, the imagery that covers them wraps around their exteriors, interior walls, and ceilings, fragmenting the images to create a scene without an obvious entry point. Similarly, the patterns and solid colour blocks with which Jones’ renders her houses creates the impression that they are without depth as these elements cover their surfaces continuously with little regard for the house’s plane changes. In both cases this flatness suggests that these structures have no interiors as it is difficult to picture how one might enter them and what one might find there. Furthermore, the placement of the buildings against solid colour backgrounds challenges attempts to situate them in a specific context. The flatness of the buildings serves as a reminder that they are two-dimensional representations confined to a picture plane and that their meaning is contained within what they represent, not in the paintings’ contents.
The qualities evoked by this flatness are related to memory, particularly to the way that memories are representations that can only approximate the actual occurrences they refer to. In the paintings, architecture functions as the lens through which to examine the ways the physical sense of one’s body in a location quickly evaporates when one is no longer in the space. The feeling of occupying a space remains in some sense through the visual, auditory, or tactile sensations that support the events that occurred in that location, but once a body is no longer present these sensations are mere recollection. The lack of figures in the paintings generates a feeling of distance from the subject matter. Additionally, the specificity of the images and patterns on the buildings suggests that they allude to certain events, but the lack of personal context furthers the sense of removal in the viewer, mimicking the feeling of losing access to an old memory. Other aspects of the paintings relate to the fragmentation of memories over time, shifting and warping as they are recalled repeatedly while the time between the actual event and the recollection grows. In Newton’s paintings, the warped, refracted imagery on the buildings is difficult to parse into a coherent whole, especially at first glance, challenging attempts to identify the location and context. The patches of colour and pattern on Jones’ houses have a similar effect, evoking the ways in which details of places are lost or replaced with other elements as time passes and they become harder to recall.
Misremembering Spaces refers to just that; the process by which absence from a space inevitably leads to a breakdown in the memories formed there. Recall of events is directly linked to place, and memories are more difficult to retrieve when one is no longer present. Much like a painting, a memory is a representation of a physical location or sensation which necessarily loses detail as its subject is processed and recorded but remains meaningful nonetheless.
Check out the archive and documentation for the show written about above:
About Mieke:
Mieke Uhryniuk-Smith is an artist with an interest in drawing and print media. This is their first published piece of writing.
Instagram: @mcfus