Mar 3 – Mar 12, 2020 | Reception: Mar 4, 3:30 — 4:30pm
With Our Monuments artist Benjamin Hoste has encased personal mementos in rectilinear blocks of concrete. Obscured from view and with their common functions debased, this erasure is powerful and absolute. At remove, a childhood journal, intimate Polaroids, and personal ephemera are forever silenced. But just as this action debases it also transforms. Concrete may eliminate the primary function of each object but it does not destroy. The work reveals through obscuring, confronting notions of memory, attachment, resentment, sentimentality, and guilt. As our culture continues its massive migration from the physical to the digital, our notions of memory as it connects to the material is poised to unalterably shift, both in relation to what we desire to remember as well as forget.