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What We Keep – Closing Reception [Rubber Gun Gallery]
May 2 @ 6:00 pm - 9:00 pm
WHAT WE KEEP brings together artists and memory workers working across altar, assemblage, portraiture, documentary ephemera, and the written word to explore how people who have been displaced, marginalized, or rendered invisible by systems of power find ways to remember, honor, and sustain each other. The works in this exhibition treat the ordinary object not as mere artifact but as vessel: something that carries presence, relation, and the refusal to be forgotten.
The exhibition emerges from the work of Our Refugee Stories Archive (ORSA), a community-centered archive co-founded on the principle that the stories of people who have been displaced belong to them, and that keeping those stories is itself an act of care. ORSA exists at the intersection of the archival and the intimate, the institutional and the human. This exhibition extends that work into the gallery, asking what art can do that the archive alone cannot: hold grief and beauty together, make space for the spiritual alongside the documentary, and honor what has been lost without pretending that loss can be neatly organized or explained.
