Until you actually see Jen Mills room-filling installation, the promised bowls of salt in You Only Have What You Remember mentally register as vessels containing salt, something youd find on the kitchen counter. When you get there, the 100+ white containers, sitting on a neat grid of wooden posts, are revealed to be made of salt. Not ceramic. And theyre all empty. This topography of memory, as the Seattle artist describes it, sags in the middle like an old mattressperhaps where a former lover once lay. But the salt itself, Na in the periodic table of the elements, is also instrumental in creating our memories. Meaning not just the taste of things that recall the past, like Prousts madeleine, but in the chemical vat that is the human brain. Salt and other neurotransmitters help bridge our synapses to form the connections that solidify into memory. Salt is also a preservative, yet theres no escaping that our memories disappear with us. Remove the water from our bodies, and youre left with a dry pile of chemicals and minerals, salt among them. Which, in a millennia or two after were forgotten, will also be recycled into new vessels and new forms. You can buy the whole array, like a very large serving set, for five grand. Or $30 a bowl. Just dont put them in your dish washer, where theyll disappear. BRIAN MILLER
Saturdays, 12-5 p.m.; Sat., Sept. 11, noon. Starts: Sept. 4. Continues through Oct. 2, 2010