t/here is a trace

(in) between the space (s) of terror i find fragments of my memory.

the memory sores room

In this installation I want the viewer to experience the burning of the memory under my skin returing insistent through hives swelling upon my skin. The room will be very warm to cause the viewer’s skin to sweat and warm as my skin has over the past year, a bodily response to the fatigue of concealing trauma from myself held beneath the skin and inevitably of the return of memory.

The room will be built of layers of soaked flowered bedsheets with gapes (mournful mouths) and pale pink damp mop threads (hair) protruding from small gaps staining the sheets pink. The floor will be covered with red rose teabags, a seeping decaying floor. The teabags are the discarded memory sores, inflammations upon the skin discarded, still pulsing, wet underfoot as memory continues to surface, swelling the skin. The walls swell and melt into pink rivers as hives do upon my skin, rising from under the skin, bleeding.

The video The sheets crying  will be projected upon the sheets in the interior of the room within the room.

I will be performing in the space using repetition and the residue of my body in the space performing the bodily return of stored memory.

Kim Dawn is a graduate of the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design, with an MFA from the University of Western Ontario. She is currently residing in Dartmouth Nova Scotia. As an installation and performance artist her work has been shown at the Art Gallery of Windsor, the Anna Leonowens Gallery in Halifax, Meg Gallery in Toronto, and The Artlab at the University of Western Ontario. Kim Dawn has collaborated with Christof Migone to explore endurance, the intimacy of embodiment and the mediation of language by technology. Kim Dawn’s work will be presented at the Western Front as a collaboration among the Performance Art, Media, and Exhibitions Programs. For her residency at the Western Front, she will be creating a new labour-intensive performative video installation titled the memory sores room. Her work explores traumatic amnesia through poetic, metaphorical images referring to her body’s residues. The floor of the room will be covered with layers of stained bed sheets and red rose tea bags, a seeping, decaying floor. Dawn is creating a video projection for the installation while in residence at the Front. She will perform inside the installation in the gallery, enacting what she calls the bodily return of stored memory.