Memory Palace 2.0: pleasure_and_sadness

About the exhibition

The project began as a way to create a digital monument that would memorialise his family’s eviction from their pre-war home that they had been renting for 15 years in Edmonton’s central district. It is inspired by the ancient Greek mnemonic technique, colloquially referred to as a "Memory Palace" or method of loci, wherein a person creates a virtual space in one's mind associated with a real space that has been memorised, making it possible to arrive at the information simply by travelling to the corresponding location in one's mind. Knowing that his house was going to be demolished, the artist turned to photographic technologies such as 360 degree spherical video, augmented reality, photogrammetry and 3D printing, to create a virtual memory palace of it, and explored how these digital tools can be used to meaningfully interact with our past by highlighting the relationship between space, objects and memory .

The two videos in this exhibition, 'The Yard' and 'The Living Room' show the passage of time through the pandemic, including cold mornings, warm summer days, and the transition from a comforting home into a space of grief and finally, an empty house. The images were selected from 360 degree spherical footages, smartphone photos, social media posts, etc. The artist created Memory Palace AR app, which the viewers can download for immersive augmented reality experience on smartphones that allow the artist's old home to be seen as it was.

The basement gallery further explores the roots of the artist's background; his extended family's home in Chile where his parents come from. Molina frequently went to Chile in his childhood and he is strongly attached to and continues to savour the memory of the large tight-knit family, their down-to-earth way of living and their sprawling house, last of which was largely modified and lost its earlier liveliness in recent years. The installation is an ode to the memory for the lost past, removed multiple times, by geography, by time, and by culture. The source for the images come from the 360 degree footages and 3D scanner the artist created in his 2022 trip to Chile but also from the family archive of photos and VHS tapes. Molina generated 3D renderings of his beloved grandmother's house based on the footages of decades-old VHS tapes, which resemble paintings or a recollection from a dream. In Molina's works, technologies, however advanced they may be, are used toward more human end, they are vehicles of exploring narrative and emotional dimensions. The 3D image of his grandmothers house, in between real and imagined, may be the kind of the memory that you locate in your mind, in slightly deformed package, but it is the image you go back to and to be cherished.

Gabriel Esteban Molina (b. Edmonton, Canada, 1989) Lives and works in Edmonton.

Molina is a lens-based multidisciplinary artist of a first-generation Canadian of Chilean descent. He creates works with poetic visual often hiding quiet narratives, using a wide variety of technologies from copying machines, smartphone cameras to the latest 360 degree spherical cameras. He graduated from the University of Alberta with a BFA majoring in painting and sculpture. His undergraduate studies coincided with the advent of smartphones and digital photography, and once graduated, his practice shifted completely towards lens and screen based work drawing influence from early video art, glitch aesthetics and net-art. His experimental practice lead to further studies in MA at Chelsea College of Arts in London which he completed in 2015. He has exhibited widely in Canada and the UK. His recent solo show, 'Memory Palace' held at Latitude 53, a public institution in Edmonton in 2022, received wide acclaim and recognitions, and the current exhibition at our London gallery is largely based on this original show in Canada, but the artist has expanded the theme treated. His other solo exhibitions include 'Liquid Crystals', Southern Alberta Art Gallery, Lethbridge, Canada (2021), 'Intervening Substance', Outvert Art Space, Ísafjörður, Iceland (2019), 'Tuned In, Spaced Out', The Works Festival, Ortona Armory, Edmonton, Canada, (2018), 'Bad Gateway', Yamamoto Keiko Rochaix (2017).