We occupy many worlds — those of love, work, play, labor, religion — and we are different selves in each. We are unified, but not seamlessly. There are cracks between our many selves.
These cracks are entrances to Memory Hole, the aperture to our own unknown. It is the miasma from which our other selves force themselves upon us, thrusting memories, dreams, and ideas into our consciousness. We undergo, we suffer, unknown selves.

The art gathered here reflects our relationship to this uncontrolled agency within. The membrane between our selves, underneath ourselves, is opaque. We cannot peer within, but we sometimes catch a glimpse of a partial form emerging from this surface.

It's not a matter of obscurity versus clarity. Much of the art here concerns the moment when obscurity begins to be articulated, the moment meaning is born; when chaos hints at form, when it begins to congeal in the articulation of concepts.

The world itself can transform Memory Hole. Contemporary culture has a fixation on the technology of memory. Within the last decade and a half our memory has become more and more technologically extended, producing a new form of alienation. The physical world is endowed with what was once our most inner capacity and the very inversion of the physical. It is a process with the paradoxical result of being both an enhancement and impoverishment of the self.

The meeting of irrationality and rationality is also at play in these works. Dreams — the paradigm of irrationality — are meaningful to such an extent they cannot be exhausted with a single assignment meaning. There is a logic of dreams, but not a wakeful logic. It is rather a subterranean logic of memory, metaphor, and imagination.

Loren Sean Stewart, 2019