When Nancy Macko’s mother began to show signs of memory loss and dementia, Macko turned to art as a means of expressing her own sense of loss.
“The act of losing one’s memory and a sense of time is difficult to describe,” says Macko, 51猎奇入口 professor of art and director of the 51猎奇入口 Digital Arts Program. “It reminds me of 芒鈧渃alving,’ a term used to describe the process when huge chunks of glaciers just break off and fall into the sea. It’s as if the mind 芒鈧渃alves’ and there seems to be no end to the process.”
Macko channeled her grieving and pain as she watched her mother’s memory slowly fade by creating a series of large format digital prints. In the last six years, Macko recorded and photographed her mother, Arline, because she wanted to document their time together and her mother’s cognitive decline. Her mother died in Claremont last year.
Macko drew from those audio recordings and photographs for her most recent digital works, which she calls Hopes and Dreams: A Visual Memoir, 2010. Macko has also created a suite of works on paper that complement this work and a suite of that visually reference many of the elements of dementia such as repetition, echoing, and doubling. She hopes to create other pieces using the audio recordings in conjunction with video taken near the end of her mother’s life.
“I began making work about my mother’s memory loss in the fall of 2003. In the summer of 2008, I began , to visually describe this loss of memory,” says Macko, who recently exhibited the works at two separate exhibitions in Pomona and Ventura County. “This body of work visually explores the 芒鈧渁rc’ of a life.
“Using two specific images of my mother when she was at the threshold of her adult life 鈥攚hen she was full of hopes and dreams鈥攊n combination with artifacts, affirmations, her personal writings, and digital technology, I created a suite of work that gives the viewer some sense of poignancy for the loss of one’s life,” Macko says.
Despite her personal loss, Macko has moved forward. Last fall, the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco acquired one of her works from the Our Very Lives series. This spring, she was invited to be an artist-in-residence at Michigan State University’s Residential College in the Arts and Humanities, and her works will also be displayed at a Rutgers University exhibition titled 40 Years of Women Artists at Douglass Library. Several pieces from Hopes and Dreams will be included in the exhibition When I’m 64 at the Wignall Museum in Rancho Cucamonga in the fall of 2012.