Continuing through January 7, 2012
An intimate series of digital prints by Nancy Macko chronicles her mother’s decline in memory due to dementia. The multicolored photographs depict vintage snapshots, handwriting, religious symbols, and floral imagery that often repeats itself to varying degrees through the series titled “Hope and Dreams: A Visual Memoir.” The levels of abstraction are due to the layering of realistic images that appear and disappear.
Two prints titled “At The Beginning” and “Open Arms” display a washed out, simple, and full figured snapshot of Macko’s mother. These soft-spoken and ghost-like images are then manipulated in subsequent pieces until there is little or no evidence of the original photographs. In “Disintegrating Memory #1” the colors don’t correspond with reality. All we can see are a few symbols that were introduced in earlier photographs. A maddening image from which to find one’s bearings, it’s both disturbing and sad as the artist fragments what appears to be several memories that come and go over time until they are eventually lost.
Published courtesy of ArtSceneCal ©2012