Working Memory

The Artist & The Studio
Michal Mor, Curator     

Alon Kedem describes himself as a hunter-gatherer, casting his net and gathering imagery from around the world. He roughly sketches these surprising images on the canvas, eventually turning them into the final piece. For Alon, the woven canvas is a field upon which imagery and signs are constantly in the process of becoming. By externalizing the images etched in his mind, the canvas absorbs them, captivating his urges. The paintbrush obscures, disassembles, and rebuilds the images – a constant state of invention, where each layer simultaneously erases and creates something new.

Throughout the act of creation, the artist must remain open to fleeting ideas – both those that develop into inspiration, and those that go seemingly nowhere. Either way, the memories are implanted on the porous jute, leaving traces on the underlying white canvas, which carries the weight of the memories – the echoes, the undeciphered traces.

The portraits seem to be watching as the artist gradually brings them to life within his temporary studio – the exhibition gallery. An artist’s studio is typically an intimate space where they experiment with their media. By transitioning his work into the gallery, Alon’s artistic and aesthetic considerations become public. The gallery becomes a space for reflection, combining the act of drawing with the act of looking at the artwork.

The portraits are silent witnesses to the artist’s illustrious activity, while the presence of visitors to the gallery creates a dialogue with the working artist.

Working Memory – Alon Kedem
Impressions by Prof. Leon Deouell

We go along in our daily lives believing that what we perceive reflects the world “as it is”. Most of the time, we manage to ignore the elephant in the room – the unavoidable gap between what’s out there, and our subjective experience. There are moments when this gap becomes evident. It happens when we encounter people with brain damage who don’t experience the left side of space (known as unilateral neglect) or “mistake their wife for a hat” (metamorphopsia), but also when we look again and reveal a completely different thing, when I realize that my friend saw something very different from what I saw, when I see that the key I was frantically looking for was there all the time, and more broadly when we realize that we were looking at suffering, and saw it as something else, or didn’t see it at all. These moments reveal the fact that conscious experience is not a passive absorption of information, but an active creation, made out of memory in its broader sense, and sensations.

In the lab, we investigate this gap and the processes forming conscious experience, using scientific methods. Alon Kedem investigates a similar question, through his painting. His paintings expose, on canvas, the multilayered nature of the sensory experience. In his powerful portraits he depicts the holistic nature of human face processing (for those who do not suffer from prosopagnosia, or ‘face blindness’), the apparent chaos in some of his paintings makes us see something new with every look, and in his enigmatic paintings in which part of the world is viewed through a kind of an x-ray machine, he reveals hidden, subterranean layers of reality.

Kedem called his exhibition ‘working memory’, exposing the poetic nature of this seemingly professional term. Working memory is the process of holding information in an active (hence “working”) mode for a few seconds, for immediate use. For example, when we shift our gaze from the map we are holding, trying to match it with the environment we are navigating. Working memory thus allows us to transform an image after it is no longer visible. Working memory also echoes the work in (art)work, and how we remember it, and, also, the fact that memory, like artwork, is actively construed, and is malleable, continuously revised with another line and another layer. Kedem turned the gallery to a work-space and in doing so he is shaping the memory of his residence at ELSC. Furthermore, he is materializing the memory of his work on an empty canvas under his new painting, absorbing a physical memory trace of his new work. What will remain?