The Art Center Highland Park in Highland Park, IL is proud to announce: Memory is a Verb: Exploring Time and Transience, a national traveling photographic exhibition featuring the work of ten women artists that runs through April 5th, 2025 : Aline Smithson, Annette LeMay Burke, Dena Eber, Diane Hemingway, Elizabeth Bailey, Jennifer Pritchard, Lori Ordover, Rosalie Rosenthal, Sarah Hadley, and Susan Lapides.Aline Smithson, Annette LeMay Burke, Dena Eber, Diane Hemingway, Elizabeth Bailey, Jennifer Pritchard, Lori Ordover, Rosalie Rosenthal, Sarah Hadley, and Susan Lapides.

About the exhibition: Memory is a Verb: Exploring Time and Transience brings together ten women exploring the liminal space between time and transience. Represented in this body of work are the universal concepts of loss, mortality, legacy, and the exploration of what inspires us to seek solace and reexamine our histories; subsequently unearthing discoveries about ourselves, our relationships, and our place in the universe.

Memory, often regarded as fixed or reflective of reality, in this project actively functions as a transformative shape-shifter. The ongoing tension between two seeming opposites – objective fact and subjective perception – together shape a cohesive whole, creating something larger and more nuanced than just the sum of its parts. As new insight illuminates the past, this influences our experience of the present moment; which is itself slipping into the past at the instant we seek to define or quantify it. In this manner, time is elusive, elastic, bending back and over itself; perception comes full circle.

The project Memory is a Verb: Exploring Time and Transience began as the world was besieged with fear and anxiety during a pandemic, longing for a return to normalcy. Feeling a sense of loss, we craved connection to our past and to each other. The pandemic also offered a unique moment in which to interpret things differently. Beyond nostalgia, which selectively employs memory as a self-soothing balm, our exploration reconsidered how we view the past, and what is of purpose and significance, in light of our changed circumstances.

Through the artistic expression found in Memory is a Verb: Exploring Time and Transience, ten women, from different geographies, experiences, and backgrounds, give voice not only to their reality, but to the multitude of perspectives and possibilities contained within.  It is a universal desire to be connected and remembered – to honor our past into our future.  The search for meaning during a time of profound disruption is a humbling human journey eloquently captured in Memory is a Verb: Exploring Time and Transience.

For more information, see Memory is a Verb: Exploring Time and Transience – A Photographic Exhibition