Colleen Flaherty

Inspired by Eviatar Zerubavel's seminal study, Time Maps, Colleen Flaherty's new series invites us to rethink the transcendental categories of time and space. Mapping our individual and collective memory, Flaherty uses streaks of color as if they were cognitive patterns, graphic hyper-links. Her visual narratives of memory and place is both abstract and concrete, unintelligible and yet coherent. In her paintings, the timeline becomes a line of time. In cinema and in photography, black and white colors are conventionally used to indicate the past tense. Similarly, in Flaherty's paintings, this binary is the palette of our mental furniture. These images are not mementos, rather they are the graphic representation of our momentous mnemonic associations. Linear, circular, spiral patterns. What is the shape of our memory? Flahery's lines become the tracks of our train of thought.

MFA San Francisco Art Institute
BFA San Jose State University