how good are your dwelling places (3 of 3)

Finding Maywood is part of an installation at Koffler Arts Centre’s off-site gallery and part of “how good are your dwelling places.” Finding Maywood resituates, wallpaper, carpeting and other materials placed in my Rochester residence by its former owner. The materials, salvaged

during our renovations, reappear here in a presentation that responds to the general architecture and the quirky cubbies of the domestic space adopted by the Koffler Arts Centre. These installations attempt to create a conduit between my tastes and theirs and now and then – a connection to what was lost inside of our gain.

Cyril Reade contributed to the placement of these mini-installations. Faeeza Masood helped with the preparation for this exhibition. Jen Burger made this entire installation what it is through patient assistance, tireless commitment and creative input – all in the context of an unheated building without running water. I am greatly appreciative of their contributions and everyone else’s involved.

how good are your dwelling places (2 of 3)

An Earlier Account is a video installation at Koffler Arts Centre’s off-site gallery and part of “how good are your dwelling places.” Other artists in the exhibition include filmmaker Rita Bakacs, Susan Lakin, and Ross Racine. An Earlier Account employs six projections in the kitchen of a former Toronto residence scheduled for demolition. Three pairs of projections situate over eight hundred drawings of a casserole dish, a pressure cooker and a slow cooker in two cabinets and a refrigerator. They represent the different cooking utensils kept in Jewish kitchens that separate those used for dairy from those used for meat. They are fictionalized traces of some one else’s everyday – evidence of an embedded ritual that affix objects and individuals.

Emma Vann helped out with the drawings that became the projections; her creativity and patience are greatly appreciated. And I certainly felt good going into this with Daniel Cosentino as technical back-up.

how good are your dwelling places (1 of 3)

Shelly's Appliance, in situ, found materials and video, 2009

I was brought up to believe a home was what you made of it.

Having been raised in the coal regions of the northeastern U.S., my exposure to varied religions and cultures was limited to attending Greek Orthodox Church services on certain occasions and eating Italian food in a Polish-owned restaurant. In 2005, my own family moved to a suburb of Rochester, NY that offered the most for our children’s education – a nationally ranked school district started by a largely Jewish community. It is now a somewhat diversified neighborhood although our immediate neighbors - all older Jewish - are pleasant reminders of its early development. Sylvia Weinthal sold us the house after building it and raising her family in it for forty-five years. Making the house our own meant taking it from its past. Within a day of possession we began to strip away its history - the record of a family and its routine intersections with objects and spaces. This has meant replacing elements of the home that were sanctified by the Weinthals’ constant presence and day-to-day tendencies with our own. I have never been entirely comfortable with that.

Sarah's Appliance, in situ, found materials, 2009

My art is both the transformed material evidence of my past and a surrogate for the missing. I draw on images, objects, and memories to form reliquaries of unconscious associations. All our experiences, performed imagined, past and future are inextricably linked to the objects and spaces that comprise our environment. For “how good are your dwelling places.” and exhibition organized through the Koffler Arts Centre and curated by Cyril Reade, I have focused my art production on my current domestic residence – what it had, what it has lost, what I want it to have, and how those relate to a collective understanding of domestic environments and cultural displacement, permanence, integration, and ignorance.

The works include fictional artifacts alongside real ones taken from my home, as well as hybrids of the fictional and the actual. All of the objects speak mostly to loss. The things in this installation pictured here attempt to recall an indistinct past that seeps into the malformed present. My inability to effectively call my past to the service of my present and my cultural ignorance surface through the camouflage of humor and dysfunction of seemingly functional objects and images.

The mezuzot temporarily affixed at the Koffler exhibition site came from the doorways inside the home where I currently reside. The Weinthals’ mezuzah remains on the frame of the front exterior door of my home.

The Hamlet

I drove my car – fast – through a pile of leaves this morning – I enjoyed watching them ride in the air current that curled around the rear of the car and then disappear.

Before - when I used to read things other people wrote that had nothing to do with what might become a resource for my students or a direction for my art - I used to read William Faulkner.

I have a terrible memory for novels and can barely recall the plot-lines of any of his stories although I believe I’ve read nearly every one. I don't think I was ever really taught how to read properly. I guess I’m content in knowing that I enjoyed them while I read them. I do remember several characters but only in the same way I remember high-school friends – in their general actions and apart from details that provide definition – except for Ike Snopes.

Ike is an idiot. He is an amoral being incapable of comprehending his own existence in the dark. Ike lacks connectivity to an agreed upon code of time and he is entirely without moral sensibility. Ike is responsible for two things – sweeping the porch and making his bed. Two things are important to him, a block of wood he constantly drags behind him with a string and a cow with which he is quite intimate.

Ike’s time is the immediate moment and, if anything else, merely comprehensions of the familiar. No memories, no recollections. “Yesterday was not, tomorrow is not, today is nearly a placid and virginal astonishment at the creeping ridge of dust and trash in front of the broom and the sheet coming smooth.” ("The Hamlet") He can see no further in the past than the block he drags behind him.

How wonderful it would be to be entirely unaware of what we should have done, to live only in the moment we inhabit, in a space that is amoral and amorphous – edges rounded naturally from a flow that is undetectable – spared from all consequence. How horrible it would be too.

Labeled Clothing

Down the nursing-home hallway was an old friend of Mammam’s – but they knew nothing of each other anymore. Anna Johns was a bit more alert than Mammam at this point and, just as Mammam did earlier, she could converse in a chit-chat manner that didn’t always immediately make clear her mental limitations. I visited The Manor with my father and we paused in front of Anna. My father said in that tone reserved for children and geriatrics, “Hia Anna! How are you?” “I’m good. Who are you?” she said immediately. “I’m Rose Topolski’s son, Walter.” No response. My father asked, “Do you know what your name is?” She promptly reached down, took the light blue slipper from her left foot and read the label inside, “Anna Johns.” she said confidently.

A Violet and a Rose

At first we would bring Mammam home from the nursing home for Sunday afternoon visits but as she began to resist return, those visits became less frequent and eventually stopped. Visiting Mammam, surrounded as she was, with people in similar mental states, was always funny, exhausting and heartbreaking. I remember wanting to go and then, upon arriving, I would immediately want to leave. The halls smelled of living decay, excrement, cafeteria food and disinfectant.

Mammam’s first roommate was Violet. I forget her last name. Violet probably weighed no more than 85 pounds and spent most of her time sitting in silence propped up in a wheelchair/highchair hybrid. On a somewhat regular basis, Violet would brace herself, take a few deep breaths and scream a brief obscenity in a volume that was highly disproportional to her frame. The otherwise quiet hallway would suddenly be filled with an ear-piercing “BASTARD!” or a blaring “FUCK!” You could see that this was not a small task for Violet and after a while we became familiar with the build-up of energy she needed to let loose these bits of her limited vocabulary. She would sit up a bit, take one or two deep breaths and one of us would intervene, “Violet!” we’d warn sternly. Her exhale would deflate her posture and her body would slouch in a bit of resolve - she’d quietly murmur, “fuck.”

As the Crow Flies

My father later said that it was the most difficult thing he had done in his life. Before he took Mammam to the nursing home – The Manor, they called it - there was a long discussion about the idea of having her live with us in our house. I don’t remember who thought what, but I remember that it was a discussion had time over time for a number of years leading up to her admission. I don’t recall a debate on the decision.

The Northumberland County Mountain View Manor is on Trevorton Road. Looking at it from a distance one can realize just how close our house (A) was to The Manor (B). Because of the terrain, the roads had been built to climb the mountains in a serpentine fashion. From our house to The Manor was nearly a three mile drive - but as the crow flies, it very close. I didn’t know that then.

They told my parents that it would be best if we didn’t visit her for a while at first; they wanted her to acclimate to her environment. Her environment wasn’t entirely new to her however. Many years earlier but only several years after Dzjajie died, Mammam found it necessary to seek employment. After some training she took a position as a ‘Nurse’s Aid’ at The Manor. Years later, as a patient there, she thought she was at work again and she turned out to be a great help around the nursing home. As her Alzheimer’s progressed that changed and, for a period, her risk of flight was high. She wanted to leave. Eventually she didn’t understand the possibility of leaving. Then her brain stopped running her body and she was bed-ridden. She was in a fetal position when she died.