Date of event: March 24, 2013, 1:00 pm – 4:00 pm

Fugitive Memories: Contemporary Photo-Assemblage
What an anonymous photograph does not, cannot and never will reveal is why that subject, at that moment in time, was selected to be captured and visually frozen like some fly in amber.

–William Boyd from the introduction to Anonymous: Enigmatic Images From Unknown Photographers by Robert Flynn Johnson, Curator Emeritus, Achenbach Foundation for Graphic Arts, Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco

In Fugitive Memories: Contemporary Photo-Assemblage, Ramekon O’Arwisters fuses found objects and everyday items with anonymous nineteenth-century photographs to investigate the subjective nature of memory and the elusive quality of truth. He believes photography is a tool used to document history and memory; however, sometimes it can be difficult to reconcile blurred recollections as time passes. What is more difficult, perhaps, is not only to remember the circumstances of the photograph, but the context and meaning in which it was initially taken. The lens through which one understands and interprets the visual context is often filtered through emotions, misconceptions and false impressions. Found objects, like photographs, also have a past rich with personal affiliations. There seems to be a primal instinct–almost unavoidable–for humans to instill objects with psychological, sentimental, spiritual, or historical connotations.

Ramekon lives and works in San Francisco, California, and was a recipient of a 2002 Artadia Award and has been nominated for the Eureka Awards, granted by the Fleischhacker Foundation and the SECA Art Award, administered through the San Francisco Museum of Art (SFMOMA). He has exhibited at the Luggage Store, San Francisco, California and Kato Gallery, Tokyo, Japan. His numerous group exhibitions include Past Forward: African Spirituality in Contemporary Black Art at the African American Art & Cultural Complex (AAACC), San Francisco, California and Decoding Identity: I Do It For My People, Museum of the African Diaspora (MoAD), San Francisco, California. O’Arwisters was honored with his second San Francisco Arts Commission Individual Artist Grant in 2011.

He has been actively involved in residencies and guest lectures at Djerassi Resident Artists Program, Vermont Studio Center, and Sonoma State University. His works are included in the public collections of the Mary Lou Williams Center for Black Culture at Duke University and the Haley Charitable Foundation, Point Richmond, California. He is currently working on an exhibition about art and spirituality, Sugar In Our Blood: The Spirit of Black and Queer Identity, for a one-person exhibition at the African American Art and Culture Center (AAACC) in June 2013.

We are pleased to have Ramekon return as our featured live artist. He first participated December 2010.