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| Stephen Helmreich & Melody Jue | |
| June 23, 2021 | |
| 4:30 pm | |
| Online |
Memory is often thought of as a form of writing, inscription, or marking. But what happens to the material imagination of memory when dealing with water, or the ocean? Does the concept of “saturation” (meaning: thoroughly soaked) do something different to the ways we approach the study of memory, by offering a less-terrestrial metaphor? This set of talks by Melody Jue and Stefan Helmreich explores how we might think about saturation, drawing on their contributions to the collection Saturation: An Elemental Politics (Duke University Press, September 2021), ed. Melody Jue and Rafico Ruiz.
She served on the board of LACE (Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions) from 2011 to 2019, with the last three years as Chair. She also served on the board of the Museum of Neon Art from 2005-2012. She was part of the art selection and advisory committees for Metro Art for the Los Angeles Expo Metrorail Line, and has served on grant panels for the LA County Arts Commission.
Stefan Helmreich’s talk, “The Color of Saturated Seas,” examines how scientific visualizations of the ocean often rely on the saturated palette of the rainbow color map. Highly saturated red may be employed to represent extreme ocean states (e.g., high aragonite saturation, elevated sea surface temperature, taller wave heights) relaying a kind of symbolic heat to the (non-color blind) viewer. Vibrant blues, on the other hand, may code for environmental health. Drawing on semiotics and theories of color, race, and surface, Helmreich offers an analysis of these associations as well as a meditation on how the color purple signifies in recent oceanic representation — as a sign of uncertainty and disorientation.
Melody Jue’s talk, “The Media of Kelp,” examines dried seaweeds and cyanotype photography (the first book of which was a seaweed field guide). How are these archival media similar or different? How does each have a different relationship to water, or to sunlight, to activate them? What do water and sunlight have to do with memory and inscription? Jue suggests that we see the ocean as a distributed photographic medium for developing seaweeds in dried and cyanotype forms.