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Named after the river that is drunk from to instill forgetfulness before one descends into Hell, Lethe addresses how what we forget creates who we are and thus forms cultural identity.

This exhibit at galleryDK combines two of Vancouver artist Karen Moe's photographic series "detritus: East Vancouver Alleyways" (2004) and "Lethe: a mock metaphysics" (2005). In detritus, Moe documented found objects in alleyways as symbols of what is discarded in society and as traces of memory located in personal histories.

The self-portraits and performance of Lethe are a response to Moe’s own abduction and rapes; the art production and reception extends this personal distress into its societal context. By exhibiting these projects together, social and personal liminalizations echo each other in tangible ways.

As a visual context to the Lethe images, Moe will create a background series of images composed of newspaper photographs of some of Vancouver's missing women along with their names and the dates of their disappearances. These women were literally vanishing as she created Lethe, a fact unknown to her and the majority of the Vancouver community at the time. But Lethe, being about memory and forgetting, can now become a memorial on many levels.

In this anguished elaboration of discarded things and disappeared women, Moe's exhibit articulates silences at the core of patriarchal culture and the social and spiritual necessity of memory's continuance.

The exhibit runs from July 2nd through to July 26th at galleryDK. An opening reception will be held on Thursday July 2nd from 7-10pm.