Born REMEMBERING

Garth Amundson & Pierre Gour

April 4 - 26, 2026

Born REMEMBERING examines memory as an embodied and cumulative force, one that shapes identity, place, and visibility across time. Bringing together collaborative and individual works by Garth Amundson and Pierre Gour, the exhibition explores how personal and collective histories are constructed, preserved, and contested. Addressing themes of loss, queer identity, and social memory, the artist's work with found, archival, and personal imagery, employing collage, photo-scanning, and installation to sort, sew, and suture fragments of lived experience into new visual narratives.

Working independently and together for over four decades, Amundson and Gour merge distinct studio practices into a shared interdisciplinary language. Gour’s research in painting and drawing and Amundson’s focus on photography converge through physical and digital manipulation, producing works that question how memory is recorded and how identities are made visible or erased. Their collaborative project included in the exhibition draws from nearly forty years of vernacular photography, snapshots of everyday life that both conceal and reveal complex personal and cultural histories. These images are bound into cyclical forms that function as calendars, memorials, and devotional objects, referencing Victorian collage and early photographic traditions while emphasizing self as subject.

At a moment when human rights and visibility are increasingly challenged on a global scale, Born Remembering insists on the urgency of making the invisible visible. The exhibition positions memory not as a static archive, but as an active, resistant process, one that continually reshapes how lives are seen, remembered, and understood.

Garth Amundson holds an MFA from Syracuse University, New York, and Pierre Gour holds an MFA from the University of New Mexico. Both are faculty in the Department of Art at Western Washington University in Bellingham, Washington. Their work has been exhibited internationally, including in South Korea, Spain, Sweden, and throughout North America. Amundson and Gour have participated in numerous residency programs, including Sculpture Space (New York), Čimelice Castle (Czech Republic), Fundación Valparaíso (Spain), Lademoen Kunstnerverksteder (Norway), the Bellagio Rockefeller Center (Italy), a Fulbright Fellowship in Mexico, and most recently Studio Faire in Nérac, France.