If we don't, remember me

Curated by Danielle Sommer

Artists: Gustaf Mantel, Alicia Escott, The SF Guerrilla Opera, Liz Glynn, and Kate Copeland.

August 30 - October 5, 2012

If we don’t, remember me takes its title from that pinnacle of noir cinema, Kiss Me Deadly. The film kicks off with private eye Mike Hammer winding his way down a dark and lonely road somewhere on the outskirts of Los Angeles. From out of nowhere, a woman appears—the terrified but caustic Christina Bailey, who asks Hammer for a ride to the city and demands he drop her at the first bus stop.

“Get me to that bus stop and forget you ever saw me. If we don't make it to the bus stop...”

“We will,” Hammer promises.

“If we don’t, remember me.”

Bailey, of course, ends up dead, and Hammer spends the rest of the film chasing down who done it. The climax of Kiss Me Deadly shows Hammer with a box of radioactive material, staring at an uncertain future—in the process of keeping his promise to Bailey, he has been transformed, possibly even killed. Following the spirit of the film, If we don’t, remember me features a group of artists, each obsessed with “remembering” (literally “to bring to mind, again”), and each with his or her own relationship to the role of cultural detritus in the process.

Gustaf Mantel’s Tumblr, If we don’t, remember me, features animated gifs paired with quotes, snipped from films as diverse as The Conversation (1974), Suspira (1977), Ghost World (2001), and Sedmikrásky (1966). The most successful and haunting are those with only a whisper of movement, which somehow evoke the mood of the film without needing to restage it.

Alicia Escott describes her art practice as a way of connecting the speed of change today with the speed of change in the geologic history of the planet, at the same time retelling the stories of our civilization. Her series, Letters Sent Sometime After The Continents Divorced, contains love letters written to extinct species and sent to unsuspecting friends. Escott poignantly takes on the cumbersome task of blending collective and individual memory, armed only with stationary.

The San Francisco Guerrilla Opera stages impromptu and unpermitted public ‘operas’ using a variety of cultural texts as librettos, including 500 pages of leaked United States embassy cables provided by Wikileaks, the Wall Street Journal, and Verizon’s advertising mantra, “Can you hear me now?”

Liz Glynn rose to prominence with her work The 24 Hour Roman Reconstruction Project (2008 and 2009), which she’s performed three times, each time challenging her audience to build as much of Rome as possible. If we don’t, remember me includes excerpts from the less-well-known “Destruction Karaoke” (2011), in which singers destroy their possessions, and from the exhibition No Second Troy (2012), in which Glynn smuggled handmade, paper-mâché copies of actual artifacts into several museums and historical sites.

Kate Copeland’s Security Envelope Series is a multi-layered investigation of materiality, time, and memory. Copeland uses the outmoded technology of salt-printing to capture the delicate beauty of a series of used security envelopes, each of which shows the trace of many hands. Salt printing captures the fine detail in some parts of the print, even as it creates a loss of detail in other areas.

Danielle Sommer is a writer and artist based in Los Angeles. Her writing has been featured by KQED, KPCC, Art Practical, and Landfill Quarterly, amongst others. She currently edits #Hashtags, a column for DailyServing about the intersection of art and popular culture. Her most recent curatorial project, Pop Up Library: The Collectors, showed at Monte Vista Projects in Los Angeles.