OPENING FRIDAY, JUNE 19TH, 7 – 9PM, REVERSE will present, for the first time in New York, four Cincinnati-based artists working on the objectification of time and memory.

Consciousness is endlessly grasping for objects as moment boxes. Yet there is an important etymological distinction between our contemporary understanding of memento (commonly misspelled momento)—a French souvenir, which can take the form of anything from a cheap snow globe to an interesting rock—and memento mori, which symbolized the medieval practice of reflecting on mortality and the transient nature of the universe. It is in the gap between these two definitions of the same term that the exhibition MOMENTO / MEMENTO operates, as Joe Hedges, Jacob Lynn, Corrina Mehiel, and Christy Wittmer work to acknowledge an objectified attachment to moments in time.

While MOMENTO / MEMENTO features four Cincinnati, Ohio-based artists, the themes are universal; Hedges’ digital paintings present ambiguous artifacts of science and technology; Lynn’s embroidered works explore family history and sexuality; Mehiel’s photos document the performative nature of identity; and Wittmer’s formal ceramic structures waver elegantly between austere and ornate. The contemporary mementos (in the form of art-objects) in the exhibition, like mementos of history, function across dimensions of time and culture.