Jamais Vu
A New York exhibition, Jamais Vu reimagines and reflects our own collective unremembering and our lived experience as a time capsule 鈥� what do we want to recall about our present reality?- K.O. Nnamdie
The moment I entered "Jamais Vu鈥� at anonymous gallery in New York, I am met with a precise spatial arrangement: All the works in the exhibition are displayed within a deliberately unfinished renovation.
Looking at Michael Abel鈥檚 Before Christ 08 (Self Portrait of Bill Zhou Facing Life and Death), 2024, a motif evokes Gustav Klimt鈥檚 Death and Life, 1908, within the gravitational pull of Abel鈥檚 landscape this motif is recontextualized and turned inward, opening up. The exhibition highlights the fluidity with which each artist moves between conscious and unconscious histories. Yet, while the artist鈥檚 methods may vary, seriality and indexical relationship to the memory are recurrent motifs. The show opens with Myles Gables鈥� Face, 2023, a painting which at first glance may portray a being that has both organic and biomechatronic features, and also calls to mind an anthropomorphic test device (ATD) or simply, a crash test dummy arrested in motion after impact. In Antonio DeLaRosa Gallegos鈥� Highland Pinstripe 31 <鈥�> 719 Pinstripe Burial, 2024, a young boy in a pinstripe suit is depicted standing strong and looking forward, towards the future. Gallegos鈥� mentions this painting is a depiction of a foreshadowing before an event had manifested. This work reanimates the artists lived experience and the truth of life and its ongoingness.
Most of us have had the experience of encountering a person who looks very familiar, yet we cannot recall having met. A related phenomenon is d茅j脿 vu, a vivid but inaccurate feeling that the current situation is familiar. This strong sense of familiarity occurs in the absence of any explicit evidence that the situation was previously encountered. D茅j脿 vu is generally accepted to be a memory-based illusion resulting from a brief bout of anomolous activity in memory-related structures of the medial temporal lobe. Jamais vu, sometimes regarded as the opposite of d茅j脿 vu, is the intense feeling that the current circumstances are novel and strange, while objectively realizing that they have, indeed, been previously experienced. Both d茅j脿 vu and jamais vu occur under ordinary situations. Compared with d茅j脿 vu, jamais vu is less common in normal populations and much more prevalent in some neuropsychiatric conditions; this difference in prevalence suggests that novelty and familiarity may be signaled by different brain pathways.
Jamais Vu reimagines and reflects our own collective unremembering and our lived experience as a time capsule 鈥� what do we want to recall about our present reality?
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A New York exhibition, Jamais Vu reimagines and reflects our own collective unremembering and our lived experience as a time capsule 鈥� what do we want to recall about our present reality?- K.O. Nnamdie
The moment I entered "Jamais Vu鈥� at anonymous gallery in New York, I am met with a precise spatial arrangement: All the works in the exhibition are displayed within a deliberately unfinished renovation.
Looking at Michael Abel鈥檚 Before Christ 08 (Self Portrait of Bill Zhou Facing Life and Death), 2024, a motif evokes Gustav Klimt鈥檚 Death and Life, 1908, within the gravitational pull of Abel鈥檚 landscape this motif is recontextualized and turned inward, opening up. The exhibition highlights the fluidity with which each artist moves between conscious and unconscious histories. Yet, while the artist鈥檚 methods may vary, seriality and indexical relationship to the memory are recurrent motifs. The show opens with Myles Gables鈥� Face, 2023, a painting which at first glance may portray a being that has both organic and biomechatronic features, and also calls to mind an anthropomorphic test device (ATD) or simply, a crash test dummy arrested in motion after impact. In Antonio DeLaRosa Gallegos鈥� Highland Pinstripe 31 <鈥�> 719 Pinstripe Burial, 2024, a young boy in a pinstripe suit is depicted standing strong and looking forward, towards the future. Gallegos鈥� mentions this painting is a depiction of a foreshadowing before an event had manifested. This work reanimates the artists lived experience and the truth of life and its ongoingness.
Most of us have had the experience of encountering a person who looks very familiar, yet we cannot recall having met. A related phenomenon is d茅j脿 vu, a vivid but inaccurate feeling that the current situation is familiar. This strong sense of familiarity occurs in the absence of any explicit evidence that the situation was previously encountered. D茅j脿 vu is generally accepted to be a memory-based illusion resulting from a brief bout of anomolous activity in memory-related structures of the medial temporal lobe. Jamais vu, sometimes regarded as the opposite of d茅j脿 vu, is the intense feeling that the current circumstances are novel and strange, while objectively realizing that they have, indeed, been previously experienced. Both d茅j脿 vu and jamais vu occur under ordinary situations. Compared with d茅j脿 vu, jamais vu is less common in normal populations and much more prevalent in some neuropsychiatric conditions; this difference in prevalence suggests that novelty and familiarity may be signaled by different brain pathways.
Jamais Vu reimagines and reflects our own collective unremembering and our lived experience as a time capsule 鈥� what do we want to recall about our present reality?
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