Assembly II, detail. Sheri Wills and John Schettino. At Home Gallery, Šamorín, Slovakia. June-July 2023.

Sheri Wills and John Schettino are New York-based artists whose long-term collaborative project, Assembly, is an ongoing series of works comprised of projections, sound, and three-dimensional frameworks.

For Assembly ll, Wills and Schettino create a second room-sized installation to accompany the main installation, first created for At Home Gallery in 2020. Exploring the precariousness of personal and cultural memory and the spatial context that shapes ordinary life, the installations occupy two floors with panoramic structures acting as surfaces for video projections. Drawing from everyday moments and ideas of landscape the videos create a tension between reflective and fractured experience. Projected imagery is fleeting but insistent, evoking the urgency of remembrance in the face of disappearance.

The video and sound in Assembly ll were developed through gradual layering and accumulation. For example, the primary audio component begins with a 2018 recording of Juraj Turtev and Marta Galbáčová’s singing in At Home Gallery; the recording was then played and re-recorded the eighteen times. The resulting 30-minute recording establishes a slowly shifting setting, as the generational decay of the sound steadily builds to become a stronger presence than the original sung melody. The ever-lingering past voices, dwindling through repetition, create an ongoing echo of what gets lost or obscured through time and re-telling.

KONTUR interview: “Unraveling the resonances of memory”.