My Nana Evelyn’s final years were marked by dementia, and from her mind’s weaving of memory and imagination she gifted me an intangible heirloom. With Across the Way, I will seek to translate that intangible and very personal gift into something that can be felt and shared by a wider audience. The project will explore memory and loss, grief and time, and the creative and healing power of imagination. My tools and materials are photography, my family archives, and audio recordings. My work will be embodied in a photographic monograph, and a collection of materials for physical and/or digital exhibition.
Before her passing, my Nana began to describe a “school” located in the empty cornfield that could be seen, across the road, from my parents’ living room window. This school was referred to as a place where her mother and father presently worked, a place they were helping to build and a place from which they were expected to return from shortly. Her vague yet passionate descriptions sparked my imagination, inspiring me to recreate this fictional space in my own mind. This “school” where reality, memory, and imagination intertwine and collide, has become a source of comfort and a place where I can visit my fondest memories of my Nana.
During my graduate studies, I would often come home on the weekend to spend time with my Nana and make work. Using my own photography, archival family images, and audio collages, my work during this time spoke to how my nana, my family and I were being affected by her dementia. Along with making much of the work that would become my monograph You can call me Nana, I also started to experiment with giving visible form to the vision she conjured of the school across the way.
In the wake of my Nana’s passing on Thanksgiving of 2018, the dedicated experiments with creating her school largely halted. In the past year or two, the need to return to the development of this intangible heirloom she left me has become more urgent. With Across the Way I will return to this more complicated and challenging subject of my Nana’s subjective experience with dementia and my own engagement with and learning from that experience. Through this project, I aim to invite viewers to step into my Nana's world and confront their own memories and losses.