Memories of the Future

EXHIBITION NARRATIVE

The first mid-career survey of artist Laura Moore, Memories of the Future assembles bodies of work in diverse formats united in their exploration of the ephemerality of technologically-mediated memory in an era of digital disposability. Moore’s sophisticated material and philosophical investigations are animated by an astonishing formal and imaginative range.

The artist’s grandfather was a stonemason. Her works carry forward this inheritance in their ambition to monumentalize the ordinary in the tradition of anonymous artisans of the past. But the familiar environments memorialized by Moore are resolutely contemporary: the handheld game consoles and mobile phones of a still tangible recent past as well as circuit boards salvaged from the curbside.

Moore’s timely meditations on the wastefulness of planned electronic obsolescence address an imagined future audience. What will observers make of our discarded devices 1,000 years from now? Holding this speculative logic of deferral in tension with the paradoxical temporality of media whose externalization of memory is always already imperilled by disposability, the artist proposes nonlinear models of time and memory. Moore observes that, “somebody can look at something and see the past and the future at the same time.” Such a Janus-faced temporality is exemplified by the artists’ use of the ancient medium of mosaic to cast media in an eerie future anterior. Similarly, the coiled outlines of Moore’s hyperrealist drawings of ancient ruins recall her three-dimensional representations of silicon circuit boards.

Moore’s weighty reflections on the wasteful materiality of memory devices and the precarious futurity of life itself under computational capitalism is offset by the mild ribald humour of her absurd literalization of media thinkers’ penchant for likening technologies to extensions of the body or externalizations of mental functions. Moore’s USB keys sprout fingers and breasts that materialize our intimate connection to our devices. Moore’s embodied media invite critical reflection on our relationship to technologies and their environmental and psychic footprint.

Curated by Adam Lauder