Aesthetics of Loss
Collaboratively curated by Linda Marcus, Jessica Meuninck-Ganger and Nirmal Raja.
Aesthetics of Loss is a collection of work by eight artists who have experienced the recent loss of friends and family members. Their studios became places for processing grief and understanding the vacuum of losing loved ones either suddenly or over a long period of illness. Caregiving, memory, loss, and the ultimate mystery of death are explored through painting, printmaking, fibers, ceramics, photography, installation, and video.
Representing grief in artwork is an attempt at understanding death and there is no one way to do it. Some artists utilize objects and clothing left behind by their loved ones and transform them into artworks, and others use ritual and natural materials as memorial or commemorative actions of grief and acceptance. In the work of artists in this exhibition, art is an unconscious survival barrier, a scrim that references something unimaginable in oblique, evocative, and moving ways.
The exhibition traveled to three venues, including:
Ukrainian Institute of Modern Art (UIMA), Chicago, IL, 02.18.23 - 04.16.23
Arts + Literature Laboratory, Madison, WI, 07.11.23 - 09.01.23
St. Catherine University, St. Paul, MN, 11.04.23 - 12.10.23.
Special programing included:
gallery talks at all three venues,
Care Showers (see below) in Madison and St. Paul.,
"for G" - a performance by Anders Zanichkowsky,
Loss, Ritual and Meaning – A Panel Discussion with theologians, artists, and healthcare practitioners,
and an Educator & Visitor Guide.
My artwork in the exhibition illustrated how a life is made up of a million little pieces. Delicate assemblages of Korean paper printed with my father’s tools of the trade (as in Val’s Transparent Gloss) express a sense of rising and going away as well as the grief embodied in the renderings of things left behind.
Similarly, Magpie, inspired by my mother’s collection of snow globes and Musings, a collection of my mother’s most treasured objects, are metaphorical cabinets of curiosity encasing fragments of her memories and craft.
Care Showers
As part of the national touring exhibit the Aesthetics of Loss, Anne Basting and I held “performances” of model Care Showers. We gathered feedback and adapting the model as we went.
Care Showers are an act of “culture hacking” — adapting existing cultural rituals to point out (and help dissolve) the shame and stigma surrounding caregiving, and opening a space for this new ritual to emerge.
Care Showers are designed to:
acknowledge both the humor and the challenges that caring for an adult or elder can bring;
build a web of support around the care partner/s;
make the receiving and giving of care a normal part of life (like birth and weddings)