Everything Counts in Large Amounts

For Immediate Release: November 1, 2007
Contact: Sarah Eberle/Ben Will

Everything Counts in Large Amounts uses painting, video and a wall installation to discern memories of a distant time and place. Sara Gates began this body of work based on photographic images and writings that documented a particular period of time in her past. She reduces these recollections to symbols, simple colors and shapes, much the way distant memories are abstracted in our own minds. These simplified images are used as building blocks to create the overall composition. By imposing these restrictions on her work, Gates is able to alter her images within a controlled purpose. This process is reflective of the way in which our memories change as they become more distant. These recollections remain within the original parameters of the event, however, the way we remember the experience changes based on the lives we have led since the occurrence. Each piece uses repetition and patterning as a means to obscure the forgotten and the fleeting. These patterns engage the idea of reduction and addition. Every mark adds or subtracts from the whole; substitutions are made, altered and transformed, but the repetition of the mark remains constant. Thus, each mark becomes a prism through which the viewer engages a distorted remnant of an unknown time and place.

This work questions the permanence and relevance of memories. It reminds us that our recollections are colored and changed by our own experiences and no one experiences or remembers the same event in the same way. She allows us to enter her private memories knowing that we will not understand them in the same manner she does. Gates invites the viewer to incorporate her recollections into their own and reminds us that things are not always as they seem no matter how vivid the recollection.

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