Where does memory live? Chance encounters with smells, songs or objects evoke forgotten, sometimes unimportant moments, even when meaningful ones have disappeared from our recollections. Memory defines our stories, and witnessing its loss — for ourselves or our loved ones — can be terrifying and sad.
Curators David Schutz, Cornelia Emlen and Allyson Evans plumb the depths of the subject with “Holding: Mementos Kept, Memories Kindled,” this year’s iteration of the much-anticipated annual Art at the Kent exhibition, which runs through October 12 at the Kents Corner State Historic Site in Calais.
“Memory has always been something that felt so rich to us all,” Emlen said on a preview tour. But the curators didn’t delve into the subject until several years ago, when Kate Gridley, one of the 22 artists in the show, approached them with an idea for an installation. Considering it, Emlen said, they began to wonder, “Who holds memory? And then, where does memory come from? How is it triggered? What happens when we lose it?”
While meeting with artists, as the curators do for months before each year’s show, Emlen was struck by how many of them had someone in their lives with dementia or Alzheimer’s disease. Gridley, a painter from Middlebury, helped her father through memory loss and dementia by reading books on neurology with him. That experience informed her installation “Witness Marks: Anatomy of a Memory,” which forms the heart of the show and resonates through the building (both figuratively and literally, via a soundscape composed by Peter Hamlin).
“Witness Marks” is a show within a show, taking over one room of the historic home and tavern to display 58 tiny, exquisite trompe l’oeil still-life paintings, along with some of the objects depicted, pencil drawings of neurons, and books on neurology and dementia. Eric Kandel’s In Search of Memory: The Emergence of a New Science of Mind sits open on a table.
Gridley paints deliberately, capturing soft, radiant light as it falls across shells, eggs, a pitcher, tubes of paint. Her attention to detail suggests that these objects have deep significance — and that a few blank or washed-out canvases carry absences of equal importance. The placement of the paintings against the room’s bare lath and plaster walls creates the impression of being inside a mind as it strives to remember.
Leaving “Witness Marks,” viewers proceed into a narrow hallway taken over by delicate, fibrous structures that recall both synapses and fishing nets, made by Burlington papermaker Veronica Y Pham. Above the former store at the Kent, she has also created “letters, gia đình ba,” an immersive installation of diaphanous paper panels that dangle from the ceiling. Looking closely, one can see handwritten Vietnamese text as voids in the paper fibers. The installation plays beautifully against the historic pencil graffiti on the plaster walls. Both suggest experience once worthy of documentation but now irretrievable.
Many of the works in the show explore memory as it intersects with the title: “Holding.” Middlebury woodworker Tom Dunne turns wood with spalting, cracks, burls and rot into polished vessels that highlight those “flaws” — sites where memory is literally imprinted into the body of the tree.
Brattleboro ceramicist Stephen Procter’s giant urns — too big to throw your arms around — populate the Kent’s outdoor grounds as well as its interior. Their human scale makes you aware of the ancient form’s physical demands on the artist. The urns feel as though they are bursting with the weight of so much emptiness.
Contrast those works with the show’s many examples of accumulation — the things we hold on to. Jennifer Koch’s “Specimen” series of shadow boxes contain flurries of studio stuff — doll parts, light bulbs, plastic spoons, shiny insects — affixed to images of Renaissance portraits, as though the objects were thoughts exploding from each noble’s brain. There’s a tension between these humble but vibrant objects and the now-unimportant identities of the portraits’ subjects. Koch also presents prints made in collaboration with her late husband, Gregg Blasdel, who died last year; she notes in her statement that exhibiting them keeps his memory present.
Jordan Douglas, of Jericho, photographed objects he encountered while cleaning out his father’s house after his death in 2021. “The process became a vehicle for accepting the loss,” Douglas wrote in his artist’s statement. The resulting photos, many of which are in contact-sheet format, convey very well the emotionally complex and incredibly common experience of getting to know a late parent better by examining what they kept — or being utterly baffled by it.
The curators of Art at the Kent normally restrict the show to artists who have never shown at the museum, but this year’s presentation includes three stand-alone installations by previous participants. One is Gridley’s; the others are a “Wonder Cabinet” by Juliana and Simon Jennings, who own the J. Langdon antiques store in Montpelier, and Daryl Burtnett’s “Gratitude in a Time of Loss.”
For several years, J. Langdon has provided antique display furniture to Art at the Kent. This time around, the Jenningses created a Wunderkammer closet full of objects from their personal collection: santos figurines, pinned insect specimens, birds’ nests, African folk art, vintage books, geodes, and bottles decorated with buttons, coins and tiny objects called “memoryware.”
Burtnett’s project, shown last year at the Vermont Supreme Court Gallery, documents each Vermont death from COVID-19 with an index card-size artwork. Its presentation here is radically different: Cards are piled on the floor and displayed on panels and plinths in the Kent’s rarely used attic, where Burtnett is creating more during the course of the show. It’s an apt placement for the poignant work, given how many people seem eager to mothball the memory of this collective loss.
As usual, Art at the Kent offers far more notable works to discuss than space here allows. Among them are Chip Haggerty’s expansive narrative paintings on paper bags, including a rendition of Jackie trying to save John F. Kennedy as he was shot, with the addition of turtles; August Burns’ tender, beautifully seen portraits; Jon Roberts’ outdoor sculptures that play with the difference between two and three dimensions; and Leonard Ragouzeos’ exceptional 6-foot drawing of a dog.
Together, the works in the show and their storied setting embody the idea of a memory palace — an imagined building you wander through in your mind, with objects that trigger buried memories through internal logic and linkages.
One wall of the exhibition, covered salon-style in floor-to-ceiling portraits, connects that notion of memory as an intellectual endeavor seamlessly with the idea that memory lives in our bodies.
“We wanted to show the breadth of humanity on this wall,” Emlen said. “We all have our own stories that we’re holding.”
“Holding: Mementos Kept, Memories Kindled,” on view through October 12 at Kents Corner State Historic Site in Calais. Closing celebration on Sunday, October 12, 3-5 p.m.; for associated events, see kentscorner.org.
The original print version of this article was headlined “Memory Palace | Art at the Kent exhibition holds remembrance and loss”
This article appears in Sep 17-23 2025.
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