Machina Memoriae explores the uncertain space between memory and history and asks what accumulates, what erodes, ad what remains when we can no longer tell the difference.

Sited in the former Blake and Knowles Steam Pump Works, the exhibitions draws its language from two completing archives: a 1911 machine catalog, and newspaper accounts of a state-sanctioned raid conducted that same year against the women who worked there. The catalog renders every machine in exhaustive technical detail. The women appear only in fragments, their presence mediated by the accounts of others. Working historiographically, the exhibitions sketches an alternative map of the historical record, one imbued with the impermanence and uncertainty of memory.

The sculptures are afterimages: blurred, dimensional artifacts descended from a body of technical machine paintings shown in an earlier exhibition, where early renaissance underpainting techniques suspended the machines between emergence and dissolution. Cast now into form, the sculpture are what remains after act of conjuring: physical residue of an image summoned once, then summoned again. Retold from medium to medium, the afterimage begins to eclipse its source and ultimately becomes more real than the original.

The silk paintings hold a lighter, more provisional register: faint atmospheric impressions, blurred to the edge of legibility that gesture to a time and place. The same image recurs three times across three silks, and each repetition arrives as its own original which is uniquely embellished and therefore read differently. Retold within the same medium. The same information, passed through three tellings yields three versions of the same story.

Machina Memoriae reimagines the historical record as an unstable chain of retellings, suggesting that history, like memory, is not continuous or fully legible.