IG: @miloglassmanstudio
miloglassman.com

Mnemic Trace

Mnemic Trace gives physical form to how memory lives in the mind—hazy, unrealistic, and slippery. Through woven form and video, this installation investigates the relationship between the structure of meaning-making devices, such as language, and the fluidity of lived experience, affect, and memory. Cloth is everywhere; we are wrapped in it when we are born and we are draped in it when we die. As a material, cloth’s ubiquity and universal cultural significance gives it unique proximity to memory in the subconscious. Video, too, activates memory. We record moments we want to remember, we rewatch videos to reminisce and revisit. This installation orchestrates the interaction between three memory devices—weaving as a process, cloth as a material, and video.

Three weavings resembling the bay windows of my childhood home are arranged in the space. Projected onto them are my family’s home videos taken before I was born. I’ve zoomed in on intimate moments of domestic life—births, children playing, seder tables, first baths. The woven forms act simultaneously as screens and as sieves, absorbing some of the light of the projected video while the rest slips through the spaces of the woven grid, composing projections on the walls with the shadows of the weavings superimposed.

Bio

Milo Glassman is a weaver working between woven form, video, and sound, examining the essential and familiar nature of cloth while exploring themes of interpersonal relationships, selfhood, and grief. In their work, weaving is a process of embedding in which the open grid of gauzy plain weave becomes a vessel for meaning and memory. Their practice is one of rhythm, tactile communication, and co-creation, transpiring between their body and the loom.