Rebecca Spinks - The Infinite Weight of Memory

25 February - 11 March 2017

After a career as a librarian working with words and stored information, Rebecca Spinks graduated from Whitiriea with a Bachelor Applied Arts (Visual Arts and Design) in 2016.

In that same year Rebecca was the recipient of the Judge’s award, Friends of Pataka Art Awards Exhibition, Pataka, Porirua, New Zealand.

The infinite weight of memory: Reel/Real Life is her first major solo exhibition and creates, through a complex technique of weaving video tape on to canvas, new stories around the ephemeral nature of information and knowledge, and the passing of time.

Video tape is a flimsy, challenging and enigmatic material to work with but the skilled use of the video tape nap by Spinks has created mono-chromatic works that achieve a nuanced play of depth and surface that create new narratives with the viewer. The text used in the images refers to plots and themes to do with life and memory.

We rely on books and other recording devices to keep information for future use.  However, many of these storage methods have become obsolete, subject to deterioration or have merely fallen out of favour.

Our memory is one such storage device that is unreliable and subject to decay and distortion.

Are our memories a true representation of our lives or just a composition of the mind? Is memory nothing more than an amalgamation of time and place? A woven construct?