Sound Memories + The Legacy Project

Both Ariel Kirk-Gushowaty’s The Legacy Project and Harold Coego’s Sound Memories give voice to the complicated memories and legacy passed on from each of their grandmothers.

Kirk-Gushowaty’s 13-part photographic series is a memoir and celebration of her late grandmother, Peggy Kirk. The images were created in the months directly after Peggy’s death, in the fall and winter of 2007. Pointedly, her grandmother remains absent from the photographs, and instead, the series is comprised of three generations of her female descendents — daughters, grand-daughters and great-grand-daughters.  This approach acknowledges the limitations of portraiture, reaching beyond a person’s visible self, and into the realm of their effect upon the world. Focusing on presence, as a way of understanding what has become an absence, The Legacy Project invites viewers to engage with the work across multiple levels of meaning.  The work is also an exploration of the shifting boundaries between individual uniqueness and shared similarities. Each portrait can be viewed as a stand-alone piece, yet together the 13 portraits expand to become something larger and more difficult to characterize. In this manner, the series reflects the ways in which our relationships and connections define, support and position us within our own lives and within the lives of others.

Outsider artist Coego’s 26-piece series builds a musical bridge driven by his old memories from his grandmother in Cuba, who taught him how to draw, play music and appreciate art, into his own contemporary renderings of art making and cultural assimilation.  His grandmother’s old music pentagrams come to him in three languages: Spanish, English and French. They unfold and reveal hidden meanings and messages among the bars. They act as a graph where thoughts and old melodies convene, creating in both a perfect and abstract way, “thought-measuring-sheets”.  These works represent a compilation of ‘noisy’ stories that are narrated and driven by Coego’s own personal reservoir of experiences. They oscillate between three languages and old melodies, which explore and converge to create a common visual language. The repetition of the musical sound waves trigger memories and plunge the artist into a melancholic echoing that becomes a raw and organic state of creation. Coego cites this process as helping him to get closer to his own personal creative equation of producing art in its purest form: (emotions=art), and he believes this is drawn from an ancestral need to canonize individual thoughts and feelings in order to process the memory.

Media Requests: Lara Fitzgerald, Programming Director, Gallery Gachet

To see pictures from this exhibition, please visit our Flickr account https://www.flickr.com/photos/gallerygachet/sets/72157625187909303