Curtain Call at Blah Blah Gallery
907 Christian St.
Philadelphia
Showing through Jan. 10 — Feb. 5, 2025
Seen Jan. 12
Close your eyes. See if you can paint yourself a picture of a room. Once that’s done, start building bookshelves against each of your walls. Walk to the far side of the space, take down a blank book and write down in imaginary ink something you’d like to always remember.
That meditation is known as the “Palace of Memories” technique; it’s a means of deliberately encoding and retrieving information by organizing facts according to location. I was reminded of the mnemonic during my visit to Blah Blah Gallery's "Curtain Call," an exhibit about “grappling with letting go” and “embracing the ambiguity of memory.”
Two untitled paintings hanging side by side carried home the show's titular sense of nostalgic discomfort. They were painted by Jill Adler, one of 15 artists whose work is on display.
Adler’s approach to the memory prompt is a negative space series that visually unpacks the past through the shifty shadows of her childhood home, as if the finish and character of a house were souvenirs that could be carried inside cardboard boxes. The images are almost the antithesis of a memory palace; the ideal of well-contained memories is undone through the imperfect rebuilding of a home, reborn out of the ashes of emotion.
Adler’s acrylic collages shed light on our contemporary interrogation with recollection. The diptych on display is like a trippy Architectural Digest tour that introduces us only to the corners of a home; these folds, Adler suggests, are where the borders of our memory meet.
Our eyes scan the smooth detailing of dark wood doorways, gaze through the airy slats of dining chair backs, and follow the trail of trim that moulds together ceiling and walls. The human figures that occupy these spaces are portrayed as blunt cut-outs of blank canvas; it’s only the texture of their nature — the gruff blue that belongs to dad-worn denim and the wrinkled tissue of familial hands — that remains.
The real subject of the room is maybe the white gleam of its light sources. Haloed sconces and candelabras illuminate potential passages through the materials of our existence, flashing fire onto mundane surfaces while shrouding entryways with murk.
There’s an uncanny neutrality to the images, as expressed through an almost sepia consistency of color that ranges from caramel to mahogany. At first I thought I might be looking at a depiction of a broken family, fragmented and defined by misplaced attention. But the canvases convey a more precise form of universality than that; they point to the grey zones of our erratic minds.
“In attempting to reconstruct familiar places, like my family apartment, I see how my mental image of an environment can erode simply by trying to recall it,” Adler writes in her artist statement. “For me, this slippage causes an eerie panic; I realized that memory is all you have left to cling to when the people who could corroborate your experiences are gone.”
There’s a melancholy to the natural pace of memory loss, but Adler’s work also reminds me of the extreme disappearance of remembrance we face amid surging dementia, dying environments and invasive artificial intelligence. As surveillance systems encroach deeper into our lives, textural explorations of the human condition — meaning creative examinations of our collective and individual searches for exits and entries through the sacred prison of consciousness — hold uniquely untold value.
Adler’s photo-realist style saran wraps the ruptured essence of our recall through the veil of domestic convention, depicting a parallel between the inherent instability of our external realities and the unreliability of our interior worlds.
Maybe it’s time to accept the ambivalence of our mental caches by focusing less on false memory of fact and more on feeling. And this could be mental illness talking, but as America rots around me, my inward meditations are turning towards arson; it feels good to let all my books – the records of our hollowed-out constructs of normalcy – burn alive in a regeneration of the structures that house our interior worlds. In the end, humans are adaptive; there are always new words to write and fresh minds to occupy.
