Josh Rowell is part of the curated group exhibition False Memory at Rugby Art Museum until the 14th of November.
A false memory is the recollection of something that did not happen or happened differently from the actual events, without consciously intending to deceive or mislead. This exhibition will explore the production of fabricated, distorted, or misinterpreted memories.
False memories are often incredibly realistic, and it can be difficult to differentiate between what really happened and what is being remembered. Many false memory causing factors rely upon our psychological desire to create meaning instead of focusing on the purely perceptual or factual. This reliance on familiarity, and our desire to make sense of the things we see and experience, are often at the detriment of being able to accurately recall certain events. Neither a vivid memory, nor a confidently held memory, is necessarily true.
Josh Rowell presents a painting from his Painting Language series, "In Event of Moon Disaster".
The work is coded using the speech that President Nixon would have given had Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin’s space mission gone awry. The speech represents a moment that never came to pass and is the creation of a memory that never actually existed.
