Music & Film
Mail Art
about the art
This month features art that reflects on the plasticity of memory, offering two perspectives on how we process and represent our pasts with Kai-Luen Liang’s film “Banana Clouds” and Sofie Pearson’s painting “I Remember You in the Ocean”.
Kai is a Chinese-American composer and sound artist whose work explores the intersections of sound, technology, and identity. His film, “Banana Clouds”, presents conflicting family accounts of why his grandfather emigrated to Taiwan—was it for bananas or watermelon? Using a mix of filmed and AI-generated footage, the story is told and re-told by both human and machine voices, creating a surreal narrative that asks: what happens to our personal memories when their gaps are filled with collective hallucinations and standardized data?
Sophie Pearson is a visual artist whose current work revolves around self-portraiture and the experiences of growing up in a tumultuous household. In “I remember you in the ocean”, Sophie recreates a childhood photograph, but blocks her father out with red to depict his passion and anger. The new image empowers Sophie to re-tell the memories in the photo and convey the complex and conflicted emotions tied to her memories. As Sophie reflects, “Simplifying and compartmentalizing memories, desensitizing myself to the past. I’ll remember you as red.”
Both pieces invite us to reflect on the fragility and power of memory, and the many forces that shape and recreate our stories.