Closing reception February 12, 2011 7-10pm

Ruth Eckland | Vera Kachouh | Heike Liss

Speak, Memory was reviewed in the San Francisco Chronicle on December 18, 2010. Read the review here.

Imagination, the supreme delight of the immortal and the immature, should be limited. In order to enjoy life, we should not enjoy it too much.
-Vladimir Nabokov (1899-1977), Russian-born U.S. novelist, poet. Speak, Memory

Speak, Memory presents new work by three Bay Area artists who explore the interrelation of still and moving image in video and photography, and its ability to contain or construct personal or collective memory. Ruth Eckland presents a series of dream-like videos in which ambiguous and painterly images unfold in small, incremental movements. Heike Liss's drawings access the primordial and universal, while her photographs of feet walking down sidewalks are juxtaposed with video of streets in motion, merging into sensitive abstractions recalling watercolors. Vera Kachouh's video installation explores a bombed and abandoned house in Lebanon, her ancestral home, which has in turn served as a palatial residence and war bunker, now standing abandoned.

Video artist Ruth Eckland creates works with a meditative quality whose elusive nature requires the viewer's creative imagining to make connections and stories. Sound is utilized in a variety of ways as a carrier of information to the senses, and as a way of adding layers of meaning to the visual images. For her installation, she will be working with Matt DiFonzo, a mix engineer/composer living in Los Angeles, CA. He works with multi-platinum producers David Frank and Steve Kipner on projects for Sony Entertainment and Universal Music Group, and is a frequent collaborator with Ruth Eckland. Eckland exhibits her single channel videos and installation pieces in museums and galleries throughout the U.S. and internationally, including A.I.R. Gallery and The Collective Unconscious, in New York (NY); Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, the Meridian Gallery and The Lab in San Francisco (CA); the San Jose Museum of Art and the Institute of Contemporary Art in San Jose (CA); the Triton Museum in Santa Clara (CA); KALA Art Institute in Berkeley (CA); Stir Art Gallery in Shanghai, China; the National Museum of Singapore; Fluctuating Images Gallery, Stuttgart, Germany; the Museo de Arte y Diseno Contemporaneo in San Jose, Costa Rica; the Tengri-Umai International Art Festival in Almaty, Kazakhstan, and Nakkas Gallery, Istanbul, Turkey.

Heike Liss finds meaning in the commonplace, imbuing the recurring events of day-to-day life and their often-banal rituals that signify the passage of time with poetic resonance. Part diarist and part instinctual recorder, she seeks out the universal aspects of human experience in varied sociocultural and personal situations and expressions. Liss was born in Du?sseldorf, Germany. Since her studies in Ethnology and Social Anthropology at the University of Tu?bingen, she has worked in a wide range of media to explore everyday life. In 2002 she received a Master of Fine Arts degree from Mills College, Oakland. Since then her work has been shown at the Museo de Arte Contemporaneo (Valdivia, Chile), CUE Art Foundation (New York), Musée d'Art Moderne et Contemporain (Strasbourg, France), New Museum School (Boston), Arts Commission Gallery (San Francisco), Armenian Center for Contemporary Experimental Art (Yerevan), Wu?rttembergischer Kunstverein (Stuttgart), Les Laboratoires d'Aubervilliers (Paris), Oakland Art Gallery, and many other locations. Heike has collaborated with artists from diverse disciplines, including choreographer François Verret, musicians Fred Frith, Patrice Scanlon and Theresa Wong, multimedia artists Michael Trigilio, Ellen Lake and Nomi Talisman, and poet Lyn Hejinian. She has received numerous fellowships and awards, from the San Francisco Arts Commission, the International Photography Institute (TPI) in New York, and the Experimental Media Arts Lab (EMA) at Stanford University among others.

Photographer, writer, and filmmaker Vera Kachouh's project The House in Souk el Gharb (2010), is a film meditation on an abandoned building in the village of Souk el Gharb, Lebanon. Through slowly unfolding imagery and voice-over narration from an interview with the artist's father, the work recounts the family's relationship to the home and its history of occupation during the civil war in Lebanon (1975-1990). This work is the first in a series of videos that join a personal narrative with various sites in Lebanon either directly or peripherally related to the civil war. As personal narratives and fractured historical retellings, these works seek to examine what it means to remember in the context of war. Kachouh was born in New York City. She received her MFA from the San Francisco Art Institute and holds a BA from Sarah Lawrence College. Her work has been exhibited at venues in the United States and abroad, most recently at The Center for Art + Culture in Aix-en-Provence, France, the Thomas Welton Stanford Art Gallery at Stanford University, and in the Project Space at the Headlands Center for the Arts. She was a recipient of the 2009 Headlands Graduate Fellowship Award. She is also an editor at Paul Revere's Horse, a journal of contemporary literature.