Robin Adsit
Past Artist In Residence
2009

I became interested in memory, aging and identity while caring for my mother with Alzheimer’s. My new work depicts figures that merge together and suggest replication and/or connection. The deliberate replication, or connection of figures suggests the flux of identity through aging, time, and our changing memories. I am interested in the role of lived experience on memory and our attempts to recover a moment in the past that is unrecoverable. Therefore, I became fascinated with the research of neuroscientist Gary Lynch at UC Irvine. He is looking at the biochemical mechanisms of memory. He has succeeded in visualizing a neural trace of an actual memory. I have started to include some of this research and the visual data in my paintings. The replication of the figure suggests cloning, which I use to investigate the multiple ways identity can be created, and changed through lived experience, genetics, and our memories.