Visiting artist at the Delaware Center for Contemporary Art, Matthew Dehaemers has structured a collaboration with the Caregiver Support Group from the Delaware chapter of Alzheimer’s Association. Dehaemers’s community based art project was sponsored by National Endowment for the Arts, the Puffin Foundation, AstraZeneca, and the JPMorgan Chase Foundation. Dehaemers is not new to community work; he has experience working for community based grant projects in Wisconsin and Kansas to create murals for schools and historical landmarks.
For this project, Dehaemers worked with four families who have spouses, parents, or grandparents with Alzheimer’s disease. In a collaboration they created three works: a conceptual video, an interactive maze, and an installation of altered cabinets and boxes. All three works concern the caregivers’ memory of their loved ones in auditory, visual and tactile ways.
The first work, a video, titled Will You Hear My Voice, depicts a composite image of both caregiver and patient. On the left side of the screen, half the caregiver’s face told stories of their ill family member before they became inflicted with the disease. Simultaneously half the Alzheimer’s patient’s face complets the screen, mute and disengaged. The video alternates seamlessly between the four sets of patients and their caregivers and their individual stories in Will You Hear My Voice. The patients’ caregivers become their sole voice and advocate. As the Alzheimer’s patients lose their ability to communicate verbally, they become defined by what their caregivers remember about them.
The mind labyrinth, titled Will You Trace My Steps, a floor piece constructed by Dehaemers addresses memory loss. It consists of interlocking foam puzzle squares in vibrant colors laid out on the floor in the shape of a large brain. The colors of the foam puzzle squares correlate with a PET scan of an Alzheimer’s patient’s brain. A winding maze is drawn on the foam tiles with indelible marker and contains writings derived from the caregiver’s experiences. Viewers are permitted to walk on the brain, without shoes, and trace the caregivers’ written memories of their loved one. By walking on a path that becomes gradually more convoluted, and reading sentences that become increasingly challenging to decipher, viewers follow the footsteps of a person with Alzheimer’s.
The third, and most moving, component to this show, titled Will You Read My Mind, consists of several altered cabinets and cigar boxes in which the caregivers reference the patients’ lives through placement of meaningful objects. The most heart wrenching objects contained in the cabinets are those that reference the loss of mobility and independence. Items, such as the patents’ car keys, eye glasses, and drivers’ licenses were isolated and made into relics for this project, showing the patients’ dependency. The cabinets and cigar boxes were arranged to allow visitors to carefully look through the personal items of the Alzheimer’s patients. Touching the objects owned by the patients brought viewers close to the reality of their life.
The altered cabinets were the most memorable and powerful works in the show, despite their creators’ lack of aesthetic training. Will You Read My Mind has the presence of true outsider art as if it could appear in Baltimore’s American Visionary Art Museum. Although the caregivers were guided through this project by Dehaemers, there was a true sense of self-taught artists in this work. The emotional impact of the altered cabinets is carried through to the viewer because of their reality and their tactility. It is saddening to imagine the Alzheimer’s patients’ rich lives reduced to a cabinet or container for others to look through.
The care in which Will You Read My Mind is executed and laid out reveals the importance and meaningfulness this project held for the caregivers. These memory cabinets don’t hold the Alzheimer’s patients’ memories, but the caregivers’ memories of the patient. The construction process, guided by Dehaemers, appeared to be a very cathartic exercise for the caregivers of letting go or a coming to terms with the loss of a family member’s ability to take care of or express him or herself.
Although there was excitement and joy in the exhibition, attending the reception was more like a funeral. The caregivers were very proud to show off their creations, and the viewers were eager to look through the cabinets, yet the underlying message of regression and memory loss were constant reminders of death close at hand. The cabinets were like memorials or roadside shrines not for dead people, but for people still living.
Dehaemers’s show evoked the nearness of death for these four Alzheimer’s patients and the difficulties the elderly face when approaching the end of their lives. It instills the fears of one’s own family growing old, losing memory, losing their ability to speak, and the inevitability of their death.
This body of artwork, which is community and craft based is sentimental in a way that maked all the other ‘fine’ art in the gallery seem sterile and ineffective. The cabinets, which most lacked aesthetic refinement, and were conceptually obvious, were the most poignant of all.
This show will be on display at the DCCA from September 15th until October 3rd.
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