As If Nothing Is Wrong

As If Nothing Is Wrong explores life passages and memory through images inviting the viewer to place themselves within an environment influenced by dementia. The work considers what is real, with layers of invisibility and a rhythm punctuated by motifs.

As If Nothing Is Wrong is a personal project blending my mom’s and my experiences during her last years with dementia. It’s often unclear where my memory and hers meet as I revisit my memory and put myself in her situation. I use my camera as an investigative tool of discovery, immersing myself while researching and discovering aspects of the disease that are new to me. I consider the effects of dementia mimicking qualities of minimalism, conceptualism, realism, and tromp l’oeil in the way the disease plays visual tricks on the mind, leading to questions about truth and falsehood. As I am rewriting the memories with my photographs, I am thinking about the decluttering of mental and physical spaces. I use simple shapes and composition as effective ways to communicate while simultaneously introducing techniques to deceive the eye, remaining grounded in the formal qualities of the image.

Though known more for my portraiture, it was important that the series not focus on my mother’s image, a “collaboration” she wouldn’t have appreciated. Instead, I consider the objects as portraits and imbue the same emotion in those images that I would in a portrait of my mother. The light color palette and repetition of patterns in the images add in capturing the dream-like state she experienced. The reality of the materials, Mom’s home and her objects, were important in re-arranging my own memory.

My photographs are an artistic element bridging medicine, complex human interactions, and familial disease. All of us will be affected by dementia in our lifetime – we will have it, know someone who does, or care for someone with the disease. Putting myself in the images, the diptych where I dress in the same clothes I would lay out for mom when she couldn’t dress herself and the self-portrait in green was how I thought of the images as opening outwards, inviting people into my experience.

Dementia changes a person’s vision; for example, depth perception is compromised in white environments and green is the last color they can see. I embody many of these changes and explore the associated sensations while making these works. The green self-portrait introduces a veneer of invisibility with more layers to further distort imagery and the reimagining of actuality. Acknowledging the long history of flower photography, my photograph of fake instead of real flowers with the attached Post-it note further points to the realness in the work. The note serves as a tag to this world, breaking the illusion and bringing the viewer back to reality.

My exploration in this series includes the fragmented technique of collage, representing the disrupted brain of a person with dementia. I manipulate my images by hand and rephotograph the objects to create complexity. The abstract effect of the resulting images is meant to challenge our mental construct, the white-on-white collage further disorienting as they sit tenuously on the edge of the paper, the horizon line that should ground us instead becomes confusing. My photographic mixed media collages transform the images of reality into the abstract while retaining a connection to reality.

As we consider what is real or not, the experience when viewing my images is meant to be simultaneously overwhelming, disruptive, still, and loving, much like the experience of caring for a loved one with dementia.