RE(FORM)ER

ABOUT THE EXHIBITION

August 26–November 16, 2024 @ Fenwick Gallery
Fenwick Library, Fairfax Campus, George mason university

In RE(FORM)ER, artists Jorge Bañales (MFA ‘21 Visual and Performing Arts) and Steven Luu (MFA Candidate Visual and Performing Arts) methodically deconstruct and reconstruct carriers of memory: photographs, film negatives, and cardboard boxes remade as screenprints, experimental video, and sculptures. Working with found or discarded materials, the artists maintain an intense focus on process to investigate ideas of memory, mnemonics, and materiality. 

What meanings remain with an object that gets left behind, after it has served its original purpose? What new meanings can it take? 

Bañales takes up these questions, collecting and repurposing discarded film negatives and test prints from the Mason Photography Lab. These represent the accrual and abandonment of experiences: serendipitous encounters, fleeting thoughts, and the disappointment of unfulfilled artistic expectations. Using sandpaper to efface the surface of the negatives, Bañales translates each into a screenprint to create a reconstructed image. With the abandoned photographic prints, he scratches the surface and paints the discarded negative sheets to overwrite the remaining image, creating overlaps of time and narrative. Through this process, Bañales unmoors memories and experiences from their carriers, creating space for new meaning to be introduced through equally serendipitous, autonomous, or unexpected responses from viewers. 

The materials that Luu uses also undergo transformation. Working with recycled cardboard, Luu crafts a series of vessels at different stages of completion—a demonstration of his continued interest in seriality, multiplicity, and mutation. This is a meditative process of reflection and attention, and each stage of construction reveals Luu’s interest in material, whether recycled cardboard, newspaper, or finishing plaster. It is also reconstitutive: boxes flattened into two-dimensional surfaces are rebuilt as three-dimensional sculptures. This is part of Luu’s ongoing dialogue with the past, and transforms memories and images into concrete objects that inhabit the present. While this process is deeply rooted in Luu’s personal history and experience, the resulting forms are imbued with universal meaning and recognition. Surfaces, textures, shadow, and light stand in place of concrete representations, creating an aid for prompting new memories.