Consider the sensation of memory foam beneath your hand, and the way a handprint slowly fades as the material returns to its original shape. On view at Never Coffee, Portland artist Sean Christensen’s new exhibition Memory Foam makes that feeling visual, thinking about the impressions left by memory.
The exhibition pulls inspiration from Ratchapoom Boonbunchachoke’s 2025 film A Useful Ghost, whose opening scene shows models posing for a muralist and how the mural made with their forms erodes over time. Christensen’s show statement calls this transformation “the dust of memory.”
“As the space around me changes, buildings go from movie theatre to boutique grocer, music venue to vintage arcade, and my face does the same,” he writes. “Those memories-turned-feelings become a folding of energy that needs to resolve itself.” Memory Foam seeks those resolutions.
A Portland native, Christensen has created a show that feels grounded in the Pacific Northwest, yet reinterprets the more obvious visuals associated with this region.
“Mt Saint Helens The Movie 1981” stands out as a strong example of Christensen’s color-drenched explorations of memory. It’s titled after St. Helens, a film released the year he was born, which creates a nostalgic container for a composition blending watercolor, gouache, inks, and collaged paper elements. A volcano erupts from the upper half, but the real draw is a pigmented world swirling beneath, with three human forms buried in tunnels of color. The piece seems to suggest that even a natural disaster contains hidden, subterranean stories—memories embedded in nature itself.
Christensen connects the 1980 Saint Helens eruption to his early childhood, remembering the mason jar of ash his parents collected. “Mt Saint Helens The Movie 1981” functions like his own mason jar, collecting bits of childhood memory and letting them mingle in one contained space. “I had a feeling my birth was related to the dust of Mount Saint Helens and its explosion. I was a result of lava and ash,” Christensen explains. “These kinds of stitches in time are where the art in Memory Foam is living.”
You’ll find other notes of the Pacific Northwest by looking closely at Memory Foam’s piece titles. In “Everett 01” and “Aldrich Park,” barefooted figures stroll among cut canvas fragments and exposed Polaroids. And two dioramas—complete with mini-easels, mini-paintings, and dried flora—invite the idea of small art studios, like spaces Christensen might currently occupy.
Exhibitions often ruminate on a central question, but in Memory Foam, Christensen doesn’t do that. The show is content to sink into the squishiness of memory. Christensen seeks the contours of his “memories-turned-feelings” and finds that they’re swirly, colorful, and ever-changing. The impressions he’s given us are what makes Memory Foam compelling.
Memory Foam is on view at Never Coffee, 537 SW 12th, through mid-May, FREE, hours and more info at instagram.com/neverlab.art.
