Machina Memoriae

The opening reception will be held on Friday. August 21 from 6-8 pm at The Foundry.  RSVP to attend the reception.

Exhibition runs: Aug 21 through September 2

Foundry Artist-in-Residence, Lauren Safier's new exhibition: Machina Memoriae.

Safier's work draws on the language of industrial machine catalogs, where a mechanism's exact form is conveyed through technical illustration. She translates this method into a historiographic practice concerned with what survives in a record and what disappears.

Her source is a 1911 catalog documenting the machines of the Blake and Knowles Steam Pump Works, once housed at this address. That same year, twenty-five women working in the foundry's core rooms became the subject of a state inquiry, prompted by male coworkers and journalists unsettled by the sight of them at work. What remains of them is only that account, written by others.

Across her paintings and sculptures, Safier reimagines the historical record as an unstable chain of retellings, resisting the idea that history or memory could ever be continuous, or fully legible.