Art Exhibition & Slow Art Day: Memory, Places and Measures

When was the last time you slowed down and really looked at a piece of art? Looked at the colors, the technique, and considered the artist's intent? If that sounds tempting, we encourage you to join us for Slow Art Day on Saturday, April 8. Santa Fe artist Ilona Pachler's "Memory, Places, and Measures" will fill the ART.i.factory space, and Ilona will join Slow Art Day participants for a discussion of her work.

Slow Art Day started in New York eight years ago and has grown into an international event, with more than 250 museums, galleries, and art spaces participating around the world. To take part, simply come to Art.i.fact at 11 a.m. on Saturday, April 8, and spend 10 minutes each with five of Ilona's art pieces. At noon, Ilona will join you at Counter Culture Cafe to discuss your experience and talk about her work. The first 10 attendees will get a free coffee at Counter Culture.

After your Slow Art experience, we invite you back to Art.i.fact for Ilona's reception the same day from 4 - 7 p.m. The show will be on display through May 31.

Ilona's work utilizes the light of her current home in New Mexico, the fleeting rush and speed of New York City where she lived previously, and the waters of the Danube river in Linz, Austria, from where she hails.

“Three days after I spent time photographing in the subway systems of New York City, Hurricane Sandy hit these very places,” Ilona says. “Six months after my return from Austria where I was searching for reflections of architecture in the waters of the Danube, the river flooded parts of the city in a 100-year flood.”

These events made Ilona question the notion of memory, permanence, the way we remember, and the distances between time and place as they change over time in reality and in memory.

The artist’s screen prints on wood and steel panels become tablets recording the intersections of sight and thought processes, present and past. They are fragments of a place, a history, and a measure of memory. Each of the prints are hand-pulled, some are painted over, and they all capture unique qualities of moments in time.

Her sculptures, which interact with the prints, are measuring devices, gauges, and reflectors. They attempt to measure and reflect on the memory. “Our instruments of measure used in everyday life,” Ilona observes, “seem arbitrary and too incomplete to be capable of measuring memory and recording its constant changes.” With her art, she seeks to correct this deficiency.