Unremembering

Words

and art by Arnav Gupta

Art often captures the essence of experience — to encapsulate a memory or express an otherwise inexpressible feeling.

Yet, as an artist navigating university party culture, I often find myself waking up unremembering the night before — disillusioned in postinebriation, with a disposable film camera as the only record of the night prior.

In my painting practice, I am drawn to depict not what I remember, but what is centric to my current disposition — connection.

To me, art is no longer about memories, but narratives. Sharing fragments of recollections with friends in subsequent days, filling each other in on the embarrassing, naughty, fraternal events transpiring outside and around the memories captured. The relationships and connections evolved in these communal acts of unremembering hold us bound together in a mutual blackmail (eliciting a look of horror whenever they begin to say “Remember when you…?”).

In this on-going series, I recreate film pictures taken on a night out in oil paint, in an act of unremembering and then remembering. Loose brushstrokes and a darker colour palette conveys the vignette of these unremembered images. There is a certain softness in these memories that could vaporise in any moment, its ephemerality reflected in the haziness of my paintings. I have just completed a painting depicting myself passed out on my friend’s shoulder at an Industry Night — the formal attire contrasting the kick-ons bar setting.

So the last question that remains is: who was that man that carried me to kick-ons?

When you’re a kid and your parents get you a babysitter, a particular sense of uncertainty emerges. Regardless of whether it’ll be your school friend’s older sibling or your hairdresser’s younger sister, the same questions remain:

Will they let me play PS2 as late as I want? What’s for dinner?

The answer to the first was almost always no; I was (un-)lucky enough to have parents who ensured that any Simpsons: Hit & Run marathon wouldn’t extend past such a time where they’d have arrived home to find me bleary eyed, ploughing through the tomacco farm in the Malibu Stacy Car. The babysitter would be instructed thusly to send me to sleep by about 9pm.

The answer to the final question was also often the same: lasagne. Specifically, Woolworths’ refrigerated lasagne that could be cooked in the oven or — for the less gourmet among the babysitting population — the microwave. I was allowed to use neither appliance and so the method was always a mystery to me, but I knew I loved the outcome: A gummy, meaty, tomato-y rectangle, saturated with bechamel, emitting an oil-tinged steam as it emerged from the oven after 45 minutes or so at 180 degrees fan-forced.

I spent years toiling over my small wedge of this semi-