My Grandma is a Meme is an intergenerational collaboration between artist Alise Anderson and her late grandma, Trudy White. White meticulously, near compulsively recorded her life, starting in the 1930s until 2018. Her archive is exhaustive, cataloging everything from cakes, hand-drawn cards, crocheted barbie wedding dresses, and paintings she created, to the more mundane, like every car she owned and every movie she saw. Such a laborious registry borders on the absurd, but also functions as a form of validation of productivity and forces visibility of work often dismissed as both domestic and ephemeral. Ultimately, these carefully curated scrapbooks, with their decades of entries, amounts to a productive life, and therefore, for White, a life well-lived.
Said Anderson, “With Trudy, there was this sense that she was always making, often choosing laborious mediums in the making process. In doing so, she illustrated the belief that constantly producing makes you a productive person, and if you are productive, that somehow makes you worthy.”
For this exhibition, Anderson mines these extensive generational archives to create work that amplifies the absurdity, tenderness, sincerity, and creativity found in Trudy’s life’s work, finding places where their sensibilities, interests, and aesthetics, and even a shared laboriousness of the approach to making, overlap. Drawing closely from Trudy, Anderson’s work exaggerate kitsch, manipulating the ephemeral and domestic through scale, and ultimately elevate, by way of humor and deep devotion, Trudy’s voice.
