Robert Zverina : memory (w)hole Friday, August 1 2008 McLeod Residence 2209 2nd Ave, Seattle, WA 98121 6 pm

In George Orwell.s dystopian novel Nineteen Eighty-four, protagonist Winston Smith is part of a huge bureaucracy whose job is to rewrite the past. This entails going through old newspapers and documents, making changes, and depositing the earlier (truer) versions in a memory hole--which is to say incinerator. With more and more information being stored digitally, the cumbersome process or rewriting history will become as easy as editing a wikipedia page. Robert Zverina is no luddite. His Picture of the Day website (www.zverina.com) was a precursor of the current blogging craze and has been updated continually since 1997. But while he embraces digital photography, video, and distribution, he is using this show to call attention to the need of preserving older means of documenting and communication. One room will be a Sofa Cinema--a comfy living room-style theater projecting 8-hour videotape compilations of thousands of short video clips recorded with a Canon S200 digital camera since 2003. Another gallery features archival prints made from 35mm photographs shot in the early 1990s. These prints will also be reproduced as postcards, stamped and ready to be mailed. Desks and writing implements will be provided so people can reach out the old fashioned way to friends and family who might not have received snailmail from their loved ones since email and cheap phoning by and large replaced writing on paper. But unlike email or phoning, postcards and letters are durable documents which refresh memories far into the future. Exhibition runs throughout August and September 2008. www.zverina.com/i