Memory is not one of the five senses. Memory includes all of them.

My sculpture allows me to reexperience fear, to give it a physicality, so that I am able to hack away at it. I am saying in my sculpture today what I could not make out in the past. It allows me to reexperience the past, to see the past in its objective and realistic proportions.

-both quotes, Louise Bourgeois, August 1997

A suspended group of cast stuffed animals, looking forlorn yet still hopeful, swing gently in the air in one corner of the gallery, bits of their well-worn fur still clinging to their little bodies, while a stark series of shaky black-and-white drawings of clock faces stare back at them from across the way. Time seems to have come to a weird sort of stop in them, or maybe it is just a halting pause. Memory and the passage of time are central themes to painter Roberta Paul and sculptor Amy Podmore, who explore them with humor and poignancy in this two-person exhibition that brings together two-dimensional work by Paul and three-dimensional work by Podmore.

Roberta Paul is a Boston-based painter whose new work is based on a series of small clock faces drawn by the artist’s father on a daily basis over the course of the past year. Paul uses these haunting images as a basis for her own investigation into portrayals of time and its relation to the body, working with personal, scientific and art historical representations of time to map her course. The artist’s hand is literally tied to her own past as she retraces her father’s marks, integrating them with her own imagery and also with found historical imagery. In this way, the artist conflates history and the individual’s struggle to apprehend, and perhaps to outdistance, time. Paul attended Skidmore College in Saratoga Springs, New York, and received her M.F.A. from the University of North Dakota in Grand Forks, North Dakota. Her work has been widely exhibited.

Amy Podmore zeros directly in on our experience of our own bodies in relation to the physical world (both natural and man-made) around us, and on the changes effected by time, emotion, memory and imagination. Podmore casts familiar objects -- from found stuffed animals to her own children and dogs -- to create sculpture and installations that focus attention on transience and transformation, to stir up our anxiety about our own temporality, and to provide humorous insight into these subjects. Whether offering resurrection to the outgrown or abandoned stuffed animals, or posing her dog's hindquarters as a bright-colored "trophy," Podmore allows us the cartoon possibility that we will survive our physical vulnerability. Podmore attended the Skowhegan School for Painting and Sculpture in Skowhegan, Maine, and received her M.F.A. from the University of California at Davis. Her work is featured in The Lois Foster Exhibition of Boston Area Artists curated by Lelia Amalfitano and Jennifer Gross at the Rose Art Museum at Brandeis University in Waltham, MA, which is on view concurrently with our exhibition.

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