Suzanne Paleczny - The Forgetting

foreign so I have been making art for lots of years probably about 30 years I guess but uh and always really drawn to trying to explore the human story or the human subject so the human body has always been the The Motif that is recurring throughout my artwork I think that initially I would have called myself a painter but I've sort of branched out and I do other work as well so a lot of sculptural work as well and I've worked in quite a few different mediums I think my inspiration just comes from uh trying to I I see are creating art is kind of a way of making sense of the world or trying to discover things about the world and I I'm interested in um the The Human Experience and the human journey and so creating art is a way of trying to make sense of some of that try to kind of unravel it so the my newest exhibit that's at the UConn art center right now is called the forgetting and it was created as part of a masters of Fine Art degree that I was doing through Emily Carr university in Vancouver unfortunately my studies kind of coincided with a kind of a family crisis in which my parents were began my father had had dementia for a few years but then my mother also began to have issues with her memory and so it was becoming pretty clear that they weren't going to be able to continue living on their own and so the the show the forgetting is kind of my working my way through it I was spending a lot of time talking to them on the phone because I unfortunately the pandemic happened and they were isolated in their home yeah the exhibit is uh was came out of that experience of just trying to to make sense of what was happening that I guess confusion and the unpredictable nature of dementia I felt wasn't really being served very well by a realistic kind of visual language and so I I felt that I needed to develop a new visual language to express these effects of dementia so I guess a question that this whole experience of witnessing my parents going through suffering from dementia [Music] question I guess that haunts me the most is is because memory is so intimately tied to a person's personality or their sense of self then I'm sort of haunted by this question of who are you if you can't remember your own story so there are several different kinds of memory and one of them is called episodic memory which means them the remembering of all the events that have happened in your past and people create a sense of self by sort of stringing together these memories of what's happened to them and so it's almost like the way people curate their their Facebook page they put they you remember the things that are important to um kind of describing to yourself or telling others who you are and so this episodic memory is responsible for sort of creating our sense of of who we are and it it makes us or allows us to think of ours our lives in terms of a story that's kind of linear that goes from the past forward in kind of a logical way stitching together these memories but then if you can't remember the memories that make you who you are um you know it's just a really disturbing thought somebody asked me recently if I thought that going through the whole process of creating all this art around dementia was cathartic in any way for me and um you know I'm I'm not sure that's true it it it did increase my knowledge of what was what is happening with them um and allowed me to sort of dig deeper into family stories and their histories but I think maybe its value just comes in terms of sometimes art is just a way of bearing Witness and maybe that's all I can do [Music]

Channel: Yukon Arts Centre

Views: 516

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Id: agfsDT0PtLs

Length: 5min 46sec (346 seconds)

Published: Fri Aug 04 2023