In “Catalyst,” an installation of prints on paper and kilnformed glass, the Chicago artist Carrie Iverson is intent on capturing the processes of memory. Much of this group of work, says Iverson, “deals with states of change, motion and imagery submerged slightly below the surface.” The lithographs and the glass pieces are meant to be viewed as a “cumulative environment” and to complement each other by offering “two slightly different investigations of the same imagery.”

In a group of kilnformed glass panels , the imagery includes a skein of rope, scythes, intestines, fish hooks/lungs, an engineering diagram of a wave and a military food parachute, images Iverson has chosen because they are “somewhat ambiguous,” thus open to interpretation. She produces the images by a combination of drawing, stenciling and gum Arabic transferring. She uses techniques inspired by her background in printmaking to transfer the imagery to a sheet of glass. In Untitled 2, for example, she cut out stencils by hand and applied the glass powder through the stencils.

Iverson is interested in examining how evidence is presented, how events are reconstructed from the “ephemera that is left behind.” For her, glass is an evocative medium, simultaneously delicate and harsh, “particularly appropriate for reflecting on the fragile and film-like quality of memory.” By their reactive nature, Iverson says, “printmaking and glass work are natural palimpsests; the development of the image remains in the final piece, making it a reflection of the process of sorting memory itself.” For Iverson, who studied at Yale and the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and has exhibited in galleries and public spaces across the country, the theme of memory is a persistent one. In 2006 her installation Wake, displayed in the lobby gallery of the Brooklyn, New York, Public Library, was a memorial to the U.S. soldiers and Iraqis who have perished in the Iraq War.