21 October - 4 December, 2010
New York, New York - Ameringer | McEnery | Yohe is pleased to announce an exhibition of paintings by Suzanne Caporael in this, her third exhibition based on a series of road trips through America. Suzanne Caporael: The Memory Store, opens on October 21st and will be on view until December 4th. A public reception will take place on Oct. 21, from 6 p.m. to 8 p.m. The artist will be present.
Congruent with an ongoing study of visual cognition and recollection, Caporael has traveled over 30,000 miles of American roads in order to expose herself to the revelations and experiences of the United States, a country she refers to as “an impenetrable abstraction.” On the back roads, memorial plastic wreaths abound, as do barely disguised missile silos, and signs for “Neapolitan Mastiffs,” “Flemish Giants” and “New Yorkies” (dogs, rabbits and puppies, respectively). A virgin pastoral landscape can, at any turn, explode into the aggressive splendor of a string of strip malls. Horses stand idle in pastures, Indiansride ATVs, and statues of Mary cavort with Disney’s Seven Dwarfs on front lawns. Caporael’s interest lies in what we make of what we see.
In reference to a previous series of paintings, Time, (2004-2006) Caporael quoted physicist J.T. Fraser: “Space is the vessel of time.” But as we know, time robs memory of the details. In The Memory Store the painter presents us with the sensation of futility and the pleasure of the effort to hold on to recollections. The spare arrangements and unrepentant ambiguity imply a procedural distance with purpose. The occasional “recognizable” shape or line prompt contemplation, while the paintings physical contradictions between hard edges and the subtle erosions of boundaries encourage the reassembly of the elements to the viewers own memory store.