Interstitial Memory, a three-part installation by Courtney Applequist, explores the volatility, influence, and interconnection of memory: its moments of clarity and darkness, formation and re-formation. Using cardboard, charcoal and shellac, each a different incarnation of trees, Applequist collaborates with materials whose cells carry histories across time and species.

Cardboard is the human interface. Over its lifecycle it records how we build, destroy, regard, and disregard the planet and each other. Ubiquitous yet overlooked, it points to the people society renders invisible: the unhoused, the protester, the laborer. Structural yet temporary, compostable and recyclable several times over, it is both resource and refuse; and which it becomes depends on how we make, use, and discard it.

Here, cardboard becomes both mirror and membrane: a material to examine the distance between our convictions and conveniences and to discover what it might take to close this gap.

Courtney Applequist is an interdisciplinary artist based in Potomac, Maryland. Grounded in painting and drawing, she explores a range of media, using architecture as a foundational framework to assert a visualization of movement, time, and the debris as a consequence of it.

Applequist holds a BFA from Baylor University and studied painting at the Washington Studio School, where she now teaches. She has exhibited throughout the DC region, SXSW in Austin, and the Delegation of the European Union in Washington. Her work is represented by AdahRose Gallery and has been featured in The Washington Post, and she is a 2023 GLB Project Seed Grant recipient.

She is a co-founding member of the ICEbox Collective, whose collaborative social and public art practice has received an ArtsFairfax AIR Grant; hasbeen published in ArtMargins (MIT Press); and has been shown in Washington, DC, and Mexico.

Website
IG: @courtneyapplequistart

My work explores dualities and the space between them: the membrane that simultaneously separates and unites two sides of a coin, two contradictory truths, beliefs, emotions, or thoughts. This membrane is often obscured by the competing sides fighting for dominance. Yet this membrane, this interstitium, holds memory not only of the sides that bind it, but also its own. Through layering and juxtaposition, I seek to make this invisible space visible, creating a lens through which each side can see the other differently.

In Interstitial Memory, I work with cardboard, charcoal, and shellac, materials that begin as trees and carry their histories forward. Cardboard especially interests me as an everyday witness to what we build, use, and throw away, and to whom we choose not to see. I want viewers to linger in the in-between: the spaces we avoid, the realities we turn from, and the connections we might yet make.