From 1924 to 1929, the pioneering art historian Aby Warburg (1866–1929) constructed his 
Bilderatlas, or “image atlas” organized in 63 panels encompassing around a thousand individual 
pieces with reproductions of Renaissance, Baroque, and Enlightenment artworks. He hung each on a 
wall in a deliberate topographic configuration, using the collective images to map the repetition of 
certain motifs and ideas across the ages. In doing so, Warburg hoped to identify and communicate 
visual and iconographic affinities he observed recurring throughout time in the work of different 
artists across cultures. He christened the project Mnemosyne, after the Greek titaness of memory 
and the mother of the muses and borrowed the title of his project from mythology in particular 
because he saw the presence of Greco-Roman themes in the Renaissance as a sign of cultural 
awakening, that after centuries of dormancy, the Greek gods were ready to imprint themselves onto 
the cultural landscape of sixteenth-century Europe.1 Their resurrection from iconoclasm, to 
Warburg, was a sign of cultural memory and proof that certain images, ideas, and stories persisted 
in the imaginary of Europeans as they entered a new age. This gallery does not contain images of 
gods or titans, but in borrowing from Warburg's idea of the Bilderatlas Mnemosyne, we have 
gathered images and objects that evoke the idea of memory, questioning the pathways of cultural 
knowledge, embodied making, and image survival. 

In this first part of the 2026 Master of Fine Arts Exhibition, we include the work of Aurora 
Pavlish-Carpenter, Nicholas Phitides, Kyle Selley, and Hannah Shipley. Using repurposed materials 
such as plastic, Pavlish-Carpenter crafts an island as a space of survival and transmission of organic 
life. Parthenogenesis evokes the fluid environment of an island as a space that shifts—subject to 
the tides and whims of the ocean. She implies a sense of hostility in the spiny starfish that populate 
the constructed landscape, forcing viewers to carefully consider how they move about and engage 
with her ambitious installation, a diorama of sorts that implies a mnemonic reconstruction of a 
bygone natural environment. Phitides conjures the sublimity and uncanniness of memory in his two 
paintings titled Final Autumn and Hot October respectively. In both, he draws equally from the 
language of mass media and the collective unconscious; things that we’d never think to notice—an 
abandoned house, a backyard conflagration, a throughway—are made monumental and 
confrontational in their isolating and eerie environmental storytelling. As time progresses, all things 
leave a mark, or a residue. In his installation Contemplating Residue, Selley explores residue in his 
indexical works involving ash and combustion. The audience witnesses the aftermath of fireworks in 
his paintings, but not necessarily the pyrotechnics itself. In a Warburgian way, he engages with 
aftermath as a form of recall, the implication of an event rather than the event itself. The 
happening lives on in the presence of the ashes and marks, prolonging its occurrence. Shipley, 
whose untitled work is presented in the Focus Gallery, brings the wall itself as the locus of her 
mnemonic experiment. Her crafted wallpaper’s surface replicates images of childhood characters as a 
metaphor for scattered, imperfect remembrance and familial ties. By indicting memory itself as an 
unreliable narrator, Shipley challenges viewers to confront their own sense of memory via the 
symbolic and literal construction of domestic space in the gallery. 

Memory is circuitous, unreliable, yet beautiful and profound to the human experience. We invite 
you to bring your own memories to the works and the gallery as you explore, however fleetingly, 
Topography of Memory. 

- Graduate Assistant, Rónan Shaw M.A. Art History