ROCKLAND, ME.- The Center for Maine Contemporary Art announced the upcoming exhibition i forgot to remember, featuring the work of Katarina Weslien. Drawing on a four-decades-long multi-disciplinary practice, artist Katarina Weslien has created a large-scale and expansive exhibition for the Main Gallery at CMCA. i forgot to remember is immersive and experiential, reflecting the artist’s “deep, on-going interest in the tactile and metaphoric power of cloth; how mute objects speak; and how objects elicit memories, emotions, and embodied imaginations in the face of impermanence, disorder, and displacement,” in the words of Suzanne Weaver, a Maine-based independent curator and former museum curator of modern and contemporary art. i forgot to remember opens on September 28, 2024, and runs through May 4, 2025.

Through architectural interventions and an elegant choreography of objects, Weslien creates an atmosphere in the gallery that is both serene and disarming. The viewer moves slowly through the space, encountering objects at all scales, both expansive and intimate: massive Jacquard tapestries, outsized letters draped over metal armatures, a wall of reflective disaster blankets, a room made entirely of felt, and a brass bell waiting to be rung. As the viewer walks through the exhibition, their knowledge, perceptions, and understanding of what is being seen, sensed, or smelled is challenged and changed. Objects mysteriously invite and evade, expand and contract, and seem to exist in a liminal space between the physical and metaphorical, shifting architecturally from the minute to the monumental. Fragments, remnants, leftovers, and vestiges oscillate between integration and disintegration.

“At the heart of Weslien’s intelligent, insightful, and sensorial exhibition, i forgot to remember,” says Weaver, “are the struggles and joys of finding new meaning through the coming together of fragments of our experiences, memories, loves, and desires. The importance of being present, aware of the physical and poetic interconnectedness of all life and to act consciously and creatively in finding solutions that shape us and our surroundings in positive and beneficial ways.”

The multi-disciplinary practice of visual artist Katarina Weslien spans cross-media installations, collaborative efforts, textile construction, books, video, and photography. Her practice responds to the familiar materials of the everyday and their ability to transform space and elicit memories, emotions, and embodied imaginations in the face of impermanence, disorder and displacement. Her education includes an MFA from Cranbrook Academy of Art, Bloomfield Hills, MI; an apprenticeship with artist Anita Graffman, Stockholm, Sweden; BFA, Utah State University, Logan, UT; and Environmental Design Studies, Arizona State University, Tempe, AZ. Weslien spent two years working with the United Nations Handicraft Development Program in Kurdistan, Iran. She has traveled extensively in Southeast Asia and the Near East and co-led study trips to India, focusing on material culture and pilgrimage studies for the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, where she was a visiting faculty member in the Fiber and Material Studies department. She is the former editor of the Moth Press at the Maine College of Art & Design, where she was also the director of graduate studies. Her work has been exhibited internationally and recognized with grants from the National Endowment for the Arts, Payson Foundation, and The Maine Arts Commission. Weslien’s work is in the permanent collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Portland Museum of Art, Farnsworth Art Museum, Bates College Museum of Art, and the Cranbrook Art Museum, among others. Originally from Sweden, she now lives and works on the coast of Maine.

Suzanne Weaver is an independent curator and writer based in Maine. During her previous thirty-year career as a curator at the Indianapolis Museum of Art, Dallas Museum of Art, Speed Art Museum (Louisville, KY), and the San Antonio Museum of Art, she played a key role in building exhibition programs and permanent collections, and was recognized for her forward-looking vision and tireless advocacy for artists and their work. As the Brown Foundation Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art at the San Antonio Museum of Art, she organized several large-scale exhibitions, including Texas Women: A New History of Abstraction, and significantly increased SAMA’s holdings of works by women artists and artists of color. Her acquisitions include works by Kevin Beasley, LaToya Ruby Frazier, Jeffrey Gibson, Sonia Gomes, Hock E Aye Vi Edgar Heap of Birds, Rodney McMillian, Pedro Reyes, Analia Saban, and Martine Syms. At the Speed Art Museum Weaver organized more than fifteen installations and exhibitions, including a major presentation of the videos and photographs of Northern Irish artist Willie Doherty. Among her thirty acquisitions were works by Willie Cole, Alexandre da Cunha, Sam Gilliam, and Joyce Pensato. During her thirteen years as the Nancy and Tim Hanley Associate Curator of Contemporary Art at the Dallas Museum of Art, Weaver organized twenty-two Concentrations exhibitions, the museum’s international emerging artist project series. Through this platform, artists Doug Aitken, Jennifer Allora and Guillermo Calzadilla, Phil Collins, Maureen Gallace, Anri Sala, and Charline von Heyl were given their first U.S. museum solo exhibitions. Among her more than seventy acquisitions were works by Mamma Andersson, Thomas Demand, Trenton Doyle Hancock, Mona Hatoum, An-My Lê, Josiah McElheny, Laura Owens, and Cosima von Bonin.