New Arrivals 2019 from September 11th to October 20th, 2019 at The Stamp Gallery | University of Maryland, College Park | Written by Maddi Rihn

From afar, Diane Meyer’s work appears to be unordinary. On a white wall protruding perpendicularly from the windowed side of the Stamp Gallery hang three of Meyer’s pieces, each of them small enough that they could comfortably fit in, say, a scrapbook. The bottom-right picture, New Jersey VII, captures a lakeside scene, an unidentifiable figure perched atop a rock, peering into the reflective water. Above it lies a picture of an early spring countryside, New Jersey IX, complete with grazing cows and a broken-down fence, not unlike memories I have of looking out the window while driving around my rural hometown. And at the top, The West I, a rust-colored desert scattered with prominent Utahan rock formations in the background. These pictures themselves are perhaps mundane, appearing journalistic rather than artistic, but upon closer inspection, reveal the true diligence and detail put into the creation of these works. Meyer’s photographs are spotted with miniature hand-embroidered square pixels, matched perfectly with the colors of the background, that alter and obscure part of the image. It’s these pixels that give the work such complex meaning; they epitomize perfectly the emotion and politics associated with keeping and maintaining memory. 

When I approach these pieces, I think of my mother’s role as the documenter, if you will, of my family. Nowadays she scrapbooks less diligently (if at all – technology perhaps lessens the pressure of forgetting) but my memories of my mother adamantly cutting and pasting pictures into a book, a now 15-year-old artifact of my childhood, still ring clearly in my head. There is something so intimate and meticulous about memory-keeping, in the form of scrapbooking and photo-album-keeping, yet we so often overlook its importance in the grand scheme of history and art. This role of the woman as a documenter is part of what Meyer is getting at with her three pieces in New Arrivals 2019.

In her series, Time Spent That Might Otherwise Be Forgotten, when Meyer combines embroidery, a traditionally feminine-coded task, with photography, and especially in this case, photographs that hold memories, places, and people, she comments on the role of the woman as family memory-keeper and how this vitally important craft is often overlooked. Additionally, the usage of embroidery brings up the critical rhetoric around traditionally feminine craft, such as fiber art, being overlooked in the realm of “high art”. Family memory-keeping is often deemed essential, but the person doing it is often vastly removed from the work. In any other context, she would be deemed a historian – but because this is considered domestic work, similarly to the way sewing, knitting, and embroidery has been reduced to craft, she is not. 

By contrast, in the age of technology, the task of memory-keeping has become largely obsolete. The age of keeping physical pictures, photo albums, and scrapbooking is long over for most people; it is no longer seen as valuable, but futile. This forces us to confront the effect technology has on memory and on history. Does technology indeed glitch, like the pixels in Meyer’s pieces, our memory of things? Does it perhaps interfere with our experience? Does technology aid us or work to our detriment when we use it to remember? How may technology skew our perceptions of others? 

Meyers’ photos bring us closer to our reality, no matter how much we try to detach ourselves from it. In the age of widespread, easily accessible documentation, how do we navigate something as inherently subjective as memory?

Diane Meyer’s work is included in New Arrivals 2019 at The Stamp Gallery of the University of Maryland, College Park, from September 11th to October 20th, 2019. 

For more information on Diane Meyer, visit dianemeyer.net