Memory keepers

FITCHBURG - Fitchburg Art Museum is not the kind of place where you would expect to see a great new scientific breakthrough on display, but there it is: an instrument so wonderful that it can detect the memories contained within an object, even very old ones, and describe the people and events associated with it.

Carrie Crane, the inventor of this amazing machine, used it to solve the mystery surrounding some old lace from the museum’s collection that had been found among FAM founder Eleanor Norcross’ things after she died in 1923. It turns out the lace had some very interesting stories connected to it and all you need to find out all about it is your imagination and a sense of wonder as you walk through the engaging exhibition titled “Carrie Crane: Beyond Measure.”

The show, which opened June 21 along with two other summer exhibitions at the museum, runs through Sept. 1. It is in a gallery across the hall from the 84th Regional Exhibition of Art and Craft, which over the decades has become a highly anticipated summer tradition. The artist who wins the best-in-show prize each year gets a solo show alongside the following year’s Regional Exhibition, and Crane was last year’s winner.

A multiaward-winning artist from Boylston, Crane’s work often takes scientific notions and enlarges them creatively beyond their usual logical constraints — way beyond. This show follows that pattern with several fantastical instruments as well as displays that resemble our everyday attempts at graphic quantification but also hint at the absurdity of trying to assign numeric values to the vastness of our creative experience.

After her Regional Exhibition win last year, Crane conferred with FAM Director Nick Capasso and asked if she could have access to the museum’s archives as a source of inspiration for her solo show. Permission was gladly granted. “So, came in one day and looked through the database and I found these totally weird pieces of cloth and lace and I thought, ‘Oh, I can do something with that,’ " Crane said, during the show’s opening reception June 21.

The intricate lace pieces, which she viewed as digital images, had no accompanying description beyond that they had been found among Norcross’ things. “So, I was pretty free to do what I wanted with them, which was to bring them to this instrument over here that time-detects the memories that are held within the material,” Crane said, gesturing to a device she created that has the era-spanning appearance of a steam-powered gadget from the far future.

On the wall behind the images of lace is the enchanting story of each piece that the implement has revealed. One of the pieces is a lace collar with a stain on one side. In the show, it’s called “Bernadette's Collar,” and Crane’s wonderful implement (wink) generated the story that it was likely crocheted for a woman named Bernadette by her Aunt Elizabeth Kowel on the occasion of Bernadette’s first cotillion.

The very impressive implement further detected that the stain was caused by a spilling of fruit punch as Arthur George leaned in to ask Bernadette to join him in a waltz. The mishap was likely due in part to Arthur's nervousness, in that he had taken a giddy liking to the young woman who had been sitting at an adjacent desk in his literature class since January. Despite the awkwardness of the invitation, Bernadette graciously joined him in a waltz and several other dances that evening.

There are other machines at work in the show, all of them about as unrecognizable as any random machine part from a 19th-century factory would be to us. You know it must have had some useful function, but who knows what? All Crane’s creations in the show are equally functional. They are all doing something, but it is hard to fathom exactly what without reading the accompanying explanations. You could never tell just by looking, for example, that the Quartet Sound Distiller can reveal the sounds of objects placed in any of its four chambers. Gravel, hair, dust, a button — anything and everything — emits a harmonic sound vibration peculiar to itself, which the magical machine can discern.

On the walls around the implements are plexiglass panels painted with acrylic to resemble things that look scientific but are totally dreamed up by Crane. There is a compelling ambiguity to these pieces. At first glance they could be real, but something is off as indicated by things like amorphous paint splotches that defy containment by any precisely ruled grid.

“Since I was small, I loved maps and graphs and diagrams and loved the puzzle of trying to figure out how to read them,” Crane said. “I grew up in a scientific home and I've always been intrigued by how things are made. I've always loved watching shows that tell you things like how the lightbulb was made, and you see this incredible machine that makes lightbulbs.”

Those early memories sparked an interest in taking the next step after making her plexiglass graphic pieces for many years. “I decided I needed to make the instruments that created the data for them,” she said. “So, then I embarked on making instruments that could do exactly that.”