While living in Toulouse, France, on an exchange in 2019, Angela Gmeinweser was often overwhelmed by the amount of information in the places she visited. The “Gilets Jaunes” protests were taking place near her apartment and the streets were animated by shoppers, protesters, bangs of tear gas, and music. She struggled to make sense of these situations, perceiving only movements from pointed gestures, and only shapes in architecture. Her fixation on these individual elements lead her to question how she was making meaning from what I perceived and formed the foundation of my recent work.

Gmeinweser questions the process of making meaning from spaces by translating memories between different media including painting, maquettes, and audio. This process is similar to what Walter Benjamin’s explains in his essay The Task of the Translator. In his writing, he describes how each time a work is translated it elucidates a kernel of a language’s true meaning. Each time Gmeinweser translates a memory or idea between media she gets closer to the original emotion held in tension between individuals and spaces. An example of this way of working is Please Hold Still, the visual form of a memory that has a sound and physical shape in other iterations. The painting is situated in the process of forming meaning and is part of a larger chain of events which, similar to the moments in Toulouse, ripple out to reveal new realities.