Hi Carl, thanks for joining us today. We’d love to hear about a project that you’ve worked on that’s meant a lot to you.

My mother was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s several years ago. In 2017 as my mother’s condition was worsening she and my father made the decision to move to Poughkeepsie, New York where I live with my husband. My mother’s condition escalated quickly in the past few years and my father, husband, and I were placed into caretaking roles during the pandemic. It was a difficult scenario as many family relationships are fraught with complexity surrounding the end of life. It is a tangled dynamic of loss and acceptance, to say the least. Through the experience, a series of works grew from the need for solace and subject matter that would provide more comfort. I retreated into the solitude within our home and the space within which my husband and I live. In this body of work,“A Qu(i)e(t)er Interior,” I painted interiors of our home to create perceived emotions among materials, beings, and the light that was cast among them. It really ended up being a story of light and longing for catharsis while mourning the incremental loss of my mom. This series of work is a response to those feelings and a search for self-care. In this particular work, I observe the relationships among materials, beings, and the spaces in which they exist and a perspective that tracks varied emotions, different points of view, and how the light is experienced within. Both a place of comfort and safety, our home provided a stage to play out this series of stories about the passage of light. Light passes through the space within our dining room. It shifts with the time of day as the objects rest upon the table leaving remnants of our shared lives and the symbols they represent. Dinners are shared and cleared. Candles are lit and extinguished. I also explore the value and temperature of the light as it shines onto the wall, through the window, onto the hardwood floor, and onto the table; a table my father and I made. A table with which we shared meals, played games and conversed over. We care for each other within this space. Within this work, I ritualize the sacred moments we share. Representations, whether visual or sensory, possess an equivocal relationship with actual lived practices. The narrative of these senses is largely formed and they reveal the manner of and mortality with which these interiors exist.

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