Curated by Ph.D. student Fatemeh Baigmoradi, the SP/N Gallery display “Held in the Everyday: Photographs of Memory and Trace” debuted in early February to capture the type of nostalgic longing one experiences when flipping through old photographs.
Baigmoradi describes the gallery as hosting spaces, items and small nuances, and all the memories those things hold. The gallery focused on displaying artwork from the Comer Collection, a collection of art featuring numerous female artists and photographers from Texas, that showcases these feelings. Baigmoradi pulled the art from the Comer Collection to magnify these feelings of nostalgia.
“[Memory] is something we as human beings deal with every day,” Baigmoradi said. “I wanted that everybody who came to see the exhibition could have a flashback of their own memories as well.”
It’s a cornerstone of many creatives’ artistic process to reflect their life experiences into their work. For Baigmoradi, she ties in her past not only through her curatorial choices, but also through her original piece, “Objectivity and Subjectivity,” displayed farther back in the gallery. The work consists of a film tape of multiple pictures that seem like screenshots from one’s memory. With the film appearing damaged, the reel seems like it hails from a long-gone era — the exact goal Baigmoradi hoped to achieve.
“I decided for this exhibition to include one of my own artwork in response to [the] archive, which is also about memory and how we remember our past,” Baigmoradi said. “Do we remember that event or that thing in the past or [do] we just remember the last photo that we have from it?”
Baigmoradi’s life began in Iran. Growing up, she would capture the world through her camera in her parents’ house. Even through difficult times, looking back at the captures meant a lot to her.
“It was my strategy when I wanted to leave a place that was dear for me,” Baigmoradi said. “I tried to take photos of it as much as I can. In that way, I carry it with myself somehow.”
While a key part of this gallery is her personal art, most of it is other artists’ work she curated. The experience of curating art proved to be a bigger challenge to Baigmoradi than making her own. Yet with an archivist and artist’s brain on hand, she found a way to overcome what can be a tiring process.
“When you are working with an archive and you are going to curate from an archive, it’s so different that if you want to curate from artists that you know and talk to them and choose work from them,” Baigmoradi said. “You have a lot to work with … That’s a challenge, but it has its own process, which is so joyful for me, honestly.”
Among the different photos in the gallery, one that stood out was the “Dimmit Meat Co” piece. While blank space made up the majority of the canvas, the photo never gave the appearance of being empty; instead, featuring buckets of flowers, a red door and a small window gave the piece character. It evokes a small-town vibe. Baigmoradi, in her essay for the gallery, delved further into how even a landscape like that can tickle our memories.
“Familiar scenes — a backyard landscaping project, a route tread by countless footsteps, or a tree standing watch over a family’s growth — are a reservoir of continuity and changing stories,” Baigmoradi wrote in the essay. “Photographs of a landscape in a rural area or even an urban landscape can create a series of memories personally recalled, alongside an inference of a series of histories common among a community.”
The SP/N Gallery is open Tuesday through Saturday from 11 a.m. to 4 p.m. on Tuesdays, Wednesdays and Saturdays and 1 p.m. to 6 p.m. on Thursdays and Fridays. The exhibition ran from Feb. 6 to March 14.
“‘Held in the Everyday’ is a reminder of the potential of photography to facilitate our ability to create and conserve memories,” Baigmoradi wrote. “Engagement with the works available enables a reflection on one’s own memories, creating a degree of intimacy and curiosity in relation to the dynamic of absences and presences present within one’s life.”
