‘Anamnesis’ exhibit at Carlos Museum invites visitors to journey through culture and time

The past is present in “Anamnesis,” on view at the Michael C. Carlos Museum Sept. 19-Jan. 24. 

The exhibit features the work of Sergio Suárez, an Atlanta multidisciplinary artist and printmaker. Three galleries on the first floor of the museum feature Suárez’s woodcut prints, ceramics and sculptures. A woodblock print on cotton depicting stars, the moon and other astral bodies — created especially for the museum’s rotunda — greets visitors at the entrance. 

“Anamnesis” comes from a Greek term for the ever-presence of the past. The show was organized by Ruth Allen, curator of Greek and Roman art at the Carlos, and Andi McKenzie, the museum’s curator of works on paper.

The goal, Allen says, was to create an artistic conversation among objects by locating Suárez’s pieces amid items in the museum’s permanent collections, in the galleries of Indigenous art of the Americas, Greek and Roman art, and works on paper.

“Sergio’s work invites us to step out of the impulse to classify by culture and by time period,” says Allen. “Of course, that’s the way that art history and museums work — but he is asking us to consider a nonlinear concept of time, and the idea of all of these things coexisting in this space.”

Suárez, an archaeology and mythology buff, grew up in Mexico City. The city occupies the same land as the Indigenous Aztec capital Tenochtitlan, which fell to Spanish troops in 1521. Some structures from the former city endure. 

“I was always surrounded by these different cosmic visions, layered on top of each other,” he says, “from the pre-Columbian, to the Spanish colonial to the sense of identity that was built during the ’50s through Mexican muralists.”

A sprawling woodcut triptych fills the works on paper gallery. The Carlos exhibition is the first time “Birth of the Sun,” “Liturgias para el umbral de otra era” (“Liturgies for the Cusp of an Era”) and “Teocallis” are shown together.  The pieces depict faceless human figures caught up in charged, possibly violent interactions. Allen and McKenzie compare them to ancient gods and goddesses from Greek, Mesopotamian and Central American Indigenous traditions. 

In the mural-like “Para un Alma Eterna Cada Piedra es un Altar II,” Suárez employs layers to evoke ideas about culture and time. The title translates as, “To an eternal soul, every stone is an altar,” words from a song Suárez recalls from childhood. “The phrase reminds me of this idea of deep time,” he says, “and how everything that we have here on Earth comes from stellar processes in space.”

The faint lines and patterns in the work resemble chalk drawings of shooting stars on a partially erased blackboard. 

Suárez achieved the spectral effect by applying a series of “ghost prints” — faint images that emerge when an artist makes a reprint without adding new ink to the printing plate. In this case, Suárez used the plates from “Liturgies” and “Teocallis,” resulting in a series of overlapping figures appearing as vague forms. 

“So, we’re seeing this amazing condensation of prints that are pulled from these woodblocks,” says Allen. “And for me, it concentrates this epic cosmic cycle that’s conveyed in these two works into a singular image — taking those figurative bodies and turning them into what appear to be astronomical bodies.”

“You’re seeing everything all at once,” says Suárez, “but there’s a legibility that’s lost.”

He likens that experience of lost legibility to what happens when an artifact’s original cultural, social and religious contexts disappear over time. 

“Imagine all the people who made these things,” Suárez says, indicating the statues, jewelry and tools that fill the museum’s Greek and Roman gallery. “There are so many invisible emotions and invisible events connected to them.”

“Anamnesis,” he adds, encourages viewers to consider these lost connections and to imagine new ones.