|
|
|
|
A Record of Baby's Days:
Joyce Carol Oates writes," Memory is our domestic form of time travel, and the snapshot revolutionalized human consciousness... conveying upon the long faded past a distinct visual immortality... as priceles s as religious icons."(Civilization, March'97) Thus the "distinct visual immortality" I create, explores the meaning of loss for a family. Using landscape as a metaphor for the passage of time, I paint the warm and inviting place now bleak and devoid of l ife, fragments and screens, disparate and fading places and people.
Curator's Statement
|
|
The artists who created the works of art shown here own the
copyrights to them. send comments or questions about the gallery to
the curator at: |
The narrative images in my
work are drawn from staged moments in time - snapshots taken by
my parents shortly after the end of the Second World War. They
were meant to convey for posterity their hope, optimism and
achievement; instead they were stashed away in basement storage,
forgotten for nearly fifty years, because of this family's belief
that the tragedy associated with them was best buried. 
Nevertheless, the shroud of
death seeps its way into everyday life, its potent power
affecting even those who were born after tragedy. Questions
remain as to ho w much of that past spread its pale over the life
that went on. This has been my project - to perceive and
interpret these snapshots through my own prism of projection,
memory and feelings. 
The
loss of a child was until recently a nearly universal sorrowf ul
event for parents. Ironically, as our public health and medical
care has improved over the last century our arrogance, that we
are immune from this grief, has created a particularly lonely
place for grieving parents. I saw this concretely during my work
as a pediatric nurse specialist. While death and its meaning is a
subject Westerners are more willing to talk about due in part to
the literature written by Elizabeth Kubler-Ross and others, the
willingness to personalize death's impact, and especially t he
death of a child, remains I believe, a taboo.
Jessica Damen
works in that special place where the difference between memory
and imagination becomes a blur, creating individual paintings and
entire installations that evoke a feeling that one has been there
before. This exhibition, A Record of Baby's Days},
explores the thoughts and emotions surrounding the death of a
child. The child in question is not Damen's own, but an older
sibling who died before the artist's own birth, and who was never
mentioned by her parents. Juxtaposing pain tings based on
photographs of her parents with that child with real objects such
as an empty chair, a pair of doors, and bowls of ashes, she
creates an intimate enclosure in which grief and longing are as
palpable as the dark cloth with which she drapes the walls. 
First
exhibited in 1998, and more recently at Touchstone Gallery in
Washington, DC, A Record of Baby's Days has undergone
numerous changes in detail while maintaining its overall
integrity and mystery. With each cycle of visual and emotional
investigation, Damen continues to explore the questions of death,
family secrets, and the inner workings of the human soul. As the
work evolves, it becomes stronger, deeper, and more accessible
both to the artist and to the viewer.