Past Tense

Christopher Brown’s great painting “Elm Street” is taken from a frame of the famous Zapruder film documenting the assassination of President John F. Kennedy. (Kennedy’s motorcade was driving on Elm Street when he was shot.) On this large canvas, Brown renders with precision an image that’s been burned into our subconscious. We see six standing figures from behind, the skirts, coats and hairstyles informing us that it’s the early 1960s. Three flags wave on the car as it passes; they slope in a diagonal line like tears down a face. Brown paints our collective memory as if to feed us our own memories — it’s both an odd and a comforting feeling, the personal and the public melding into one.

That feeling happens a lot in the Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art’s show Remembering the Future. The 40 works (culled mostly from the permanent collection of Bebe and Crosby Kemper) use a variety of media to examine time, memory and loss. Amid the photography, sculpture, video projection, installations and paintings are some works we’ve seen before, some we have not, but all somehow familiar.

Short epigraphs such as “Time will tell,” “We are all losers” or “I remember when” introduce viewers to each section of the show. The strongest pieces are those that express the qualities of memory and time most immediately, if not literally.

In Japanese-American Bruce Yonemoto’s beautiful and poetic “The Wedding,” a byobu — a traditional gold-leaf Japanese screen — glows from the light of a video projector. The multipaneled screen unfolds like a long accordion, with the left panels showing a film of clouds racing across a deep-blue sky. The right half of the screen shows footage of a Japanese couple re-enacting a traditional wedding ceremony in slow motion. Vague and impressionistic, it’s like scenes from a dream. Viewed together, the two sides show the duality of time, how individual moments seem frozen in place while others race by. The separate images move at different speeds and are joined at the center — memory and time intertwined.

Further removed from the literal world is the curiously unforgettable installation “Great White Dialogue,” in which the Uruguayan artist Marco Maggi uses 24,549 sheets of white paper to make 49 stacks, all of equal height, arranged in seven rows of seven to make a flat, square grid. Up close, some piles have surfaces decorated with tiny paper figures and unrecognizable objects; minuscule triangles could be a row of teepees, and slivers of paper might be tools or tiny people. From above, the piles form an aerial map of a clean and barren land occupied by tiny civilizations.

There’s an odd juxtaposition — natural butterfly wings powered by mechanical arms — in John Kalymnios’ playful and complex “Untitled (Butterfly).” Diagonal rows of boxes form a butterfly shape on the floor. Motors drive devices that move the resin-coated butterfly wings, which are mounted atop aluminum poles that are 3 feet to 6 feet tall. Each insect motor hums quietly while the wings flap in slow, even movements, gliding without going anywhere. The effect is soothing.

Then there’s Dean Mitchell’s painful portrait of his late Uncle Sam. Terminally ill, he lies prone in bed, surrounded by an AIDS quilt, the unknowable afterlife expressed in the absence of a background. “Release Me” sensitively invokes the grace and humility of the man’s passing; the image lingers outside the gallery.