TheLEDC's Art Committee invites you to celebrate the opening of our newest art exhibit, "Object Memory"

The LEDC's Art Committee invites you to join us for the opening reception for Object Memory.

Without prompting, some objects have the ability to transport us to another time and place. These imprints, however, are often fragile and fallible — shaped by telling, retelling, omission, and embellishment.

In Object Memory , artists Jen Blazina and Ashley Catharine Smith collect, mend, and revise objects — some inherited from family members, others left behind by strangers — to explore how the things we inherit can become objects of myth, shaping our understanding of the past, each other, and ourselves.
Jen Blazina is a record keeper of memories. She salvages discarded objects, revealing their worth as vessels of personal history. By recreating fragile items in bronze and glass, she renders them durable against the wear of time, preserving traces of stories that might otherwise fade.

Ashley Catharine Smith examines the forces of emotional expectations and gender roles, unraveling how they shape relationships and narratives of identity. Using objects from family members as a foundation, her work confronts fractures of trust, both within her family and in a society that has repeatedly betrayed the trust of women.

Playful at times and poignant at others, Blazina and Smith's charged objects evoke cherished memories and honor past lives, while acknowledging the weight of anxiety and intergenerational trauma. Together they remind us that repair — whether of objects, relationships, or histories — is an ongoing process of adaptation and reinvention. What stories can we mend? In what ways do we revise them? And why should we make space for time-worn objects in our modern lives?

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