Exhibition Info
ON VIEW THROUGH JUNE 25, 2017
CURATED BY: REYA SEHGAL
Memory in Multiplesis an exhibition of artist books and matrices by Chilean printmaker María Verónica San Martín. San Martín’s research-based practice centers on documenting the violence of the military dictatorship in Chile. Through archival research—looking for those who were disappeared by the dictatorship between 1973 and 1990—she makes public the stories hidden deep in declassified documents. As printmaking itself is a process of removal, negation, and reappearance in multiples, San Martín simultaneously signals the quiet erosion of memory and literal disappearance of these bodies in the collective memory of violence in Chile. Her books, installed, take the form of sculptural memorials, creating spaces of absence, reflection, and resistance.
In Memory in Multiples, San Martín references Peter Eisenman’s iconic memorial architecture, choreographic movement through a textured landscape of memorials. Here, she signals that the architecture of memory, at a remove, becomes a global experience of both immersion and forgetting. This timely subject matter speaks to a global trend of systematic oppression and sanitized, de-politicized forms of mourning. Memory in Multiples argues instead that memory itself is political, and San Martín beautifully evokes the urgency of history through its capacity to fade.
María Verónica San Martín is a Chilean printmaker, bookmaker, and performer whose work examines the often silenced violence in Chilean collective memory. Represented by Booklyn Inc., in New York, she has exhibited at the Museum of Memory and Human Rights, Santiago, Chile; Stanford University Museum, Stanford, CA; Minneapolis Museum, Minneapolis, MN; Museum of Contemporary Art, Santiago, Chile; Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.; LARVA – Varieties Arts Lab, Guadalajara, MX, and Centro Cultural Estación Antofagasta, Antofagasta, Chile. Her work can be found in the collections of the Pompidou Centre, Paris, France; Museum Meermanno-Westreenianum, The Hague, Netherlands; Klingspor Museum, Offenbach am Main, Germany; New York Public Library, NY; Yale University, New Haven, CT; Harvard University, Cambridge, MA; Stanford University, Stanford, CA; and the Library of Congress. In 2016 San Martín attended the Art OMI Residency in Ghent, NY. She is currently an artist-in-residency at The Center for Book Arts, NY, with a FONDART fellow from the Cultural Council of Chile. San Martínwas selected to participate in the Whitney Museum of American Art’s Independent Study Program (ISP) in 2017-2018. She received her MA in Book Arts from The Corcoran School of Art and Design, The George Washington University, Washington, D.C.