SAN DIEGO.- The Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego opened Memory Is Your Image of Perfection at MCASD’s Downtown 1001 Kettner location. The exhibition, curated by MCASD Assistant Curator Lucía Sanromán, presents photography and video works from the Museum’s collection that were created by women artists of Southern and Baja California. The exhibition will be on view through November 30, 2008.

Memory Is Your Image of Perfection—which takes its title from a photograph by Barbara Kruger—investigates the subject of memory through associations, oppositions, and overlaps amongst photographic genres that range from straight documentary photography to manipulated photography. Often driven by a Feminist critique of the visual languages and politics of representation, artists in the exhibition have expanded the usages and limits of photographic media. They have exploited the ambiguities created by trust in photography as a realistic record and the artists’ desire to express their own subjective and individual positions through this medium.

Works by Eleanor Antin, Uta Barth, Andrea Bowers, Sharon Lockhart, Ana Machado, and Yvonne Venegas, among others, span the gamut of approaches from straight documentary photography to pieces that record conceptual performances; video and photography that manipulate the physical characteristics of the medium to imply the personal and subjective; and finally to works that apply formal and narrative strategies from mass media, drawing, and painting, and transpose those into photographic forms. In addition, Kerry Tribe and Susan Silton from Los Angeles, and Alicia Tsuchiya from Ensenada, have been invited to present artworks that explore different forms of remembering and that continue and advance approaches often pioneered by artists in the collection.

Memory Is Your Image of Perfection is the first in a three-part series of exhibitions that will be on view at MCASD’s Downtown 1001 Kettner location that explore interconnected themes and genres in the work of women artists of Southern and Baja California. The exhibitions run sequentially and start with Memory Is Your Image of Perfection (8/3/08-11/30/08), followed by Drawing the Line (12/14/08-4/12/09)—featuring drawings, works on paper, and mixed media pieces—and ending with Abstraction for Everyday Life (4/26/09-8/6/09)—featuring abstract painting, drawing, and installation. Each of these exhibitions begins from an investigation of artworks in the MCASD collection, which are grouped by media. Collection pieces will be augmented with selected works by invited women artists from Los Angeles to Ensenada.

Memory Is Your Image of Perfection is part of MCASD’s multiyear collection interpretation initiative, Connecting to Place, funded by The Getty Foundation. Additional support for the project comes from the Cochrane Exhibition Fund, The James Irvine Foundation, the City of San Diego Commission for Arts and Culture, and the County of San Diego Community Enhancement Fund.