Long Beach installation artist Slater Barron will pay homage to the millions of people with Alzheimer’s disease and their caretakers in her exhibit My Mother’s Garden Part II, which will open at Greenly Art Space in Signal Hill on Saturday, Feb. 21.
Barron, who has become known for her creations using dryer lint, first began noticing odd behavior in her own mother in the mid 1970s before realizing that she was suffering from the effects of Alzheimer’s.
“Her habit of using a regular fly swatter out in the garden struck me as ridiculous when she spent a great deal of time there doing it in her bathrobe,” Barron said. “That vision of her became the first lint installation of the activity called ‘My Mother’s Garden,’ and I included a lint figure of my father drinking beer in the house and worrying about her.”
Barron followed up that work with a performance piece that likened her mother’s behavior to her own when the artist used a pink poison disc in a pie tin in her garden to attract flies and turned that into art as she researched more about Alzheimer’s.
“Soon it became clearly undeniable that the disease had taken hold of her,” Barron said. “Eventually, the same became true of my father as well. More lint installations, portraits and performances documented the onslaught, and our family decided that both parents had to be admitted to a locked care facility to keep them safe.”
In the course of eight years of visiting often, Barron’s family got to know many of the other patients and gave them descriptive names. She said her heart was filled with compassion as she realized that they were loved and were, perhaps, mother, brother, daughter, friend to other people who were also saddened by their condition. She wrote poetry about them and invented former lives to make a book. Still using her experiences with the tragic situation, she wanted a more permanent artistic installation, as the lint work became too much of a burden to store and reinstall. Her new exhibit is the result.
“A painted background shows the environment and other patients,” she said. “Because I could not photograph them, I had to rely on my memory and similar found images to paint them. My family recognized who the figures depicted, so I must have come close. My mother continually walked the grounds in and out of all three buildings and to the laundry and flower garden. It often took some time to track her down when I visited. I photographed her to use for the cut-out figures.”
Barron said she worked on the installation off and on through the years from the ’80s until her mother’s death in 1990. Her father had died four years earlier, but by then her mother could not communicate her sense of loss.
“After her death, I rolled up the canvas and put it away until Kimberly Hocking invited me to install My Mother’s Garden Part II at Greenly Art Space,” Barron said. “I have never seen the entire piece all together until the current installation. This is the right time to pay homage to the 5 million people with Alzheimer’s disease and their caretakers as I am deeply concerned that the funding for research is low and no cure is in sight.”
All the figures in the piece are outlined in red to show their separation from the environment and often from the moment.
“My mother was usually found by the bright colors of the clothes we bought her,” Barron said. “I drew her face and hands with pencil as she became more two dimensional and mentally more distant. Towards the end of her life, I stopped painting the drawn figures and left the ones of my mother and father sitting together for the final drawing with the hope that they are forever together again.”
My Mother’s Garden Part II will open at Greenly Art Space, 2698 Junipero Ave. #113, in Signal Hill, on Saturday, Feb. 21 from 6pm to 9pm. The exhibit will run through April 8. Regular gallery hours are Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays from 11am to 2pm, or by appointment. The exhibit is free and open to the public. For more information, call Greenly at (562) 533-4020.
Source: Greenly Art Space
Artist Slater Barron with the cut-out pieces she created to document her mother’s experience with Alzheimer’s disease.
