Performance / Jenny Fine
14.10.2012
Jenny Fine (Columbus Ohio) ab 19 Uhr / Performance 20 Uhr
Flat Granny and Me: The everyday things
Künstleraustausch Columbus Ohio Freistaat Sachsen
gefördert durch das KdFS & GCAC
organisiert vom Kunsthaus Raskolnikow e.V.
in Kooperation mit geh8 Kunstraum und Ateliers e.V.
Engaging a cross disciplinary practice, incorporating both contemporary and historical photographic processes, moving image, installation, performance and storytelling, I create images and environments inspired by my rural southern landscape and my family’s stories.
After the death of the family matriarch: my grandmother, I began to seek out new forms of working that would extend my collaboration with my grandmother beyond her death. With an interest in the Victorian photographic stand-in and the contemporary Flat Daddy, life-sized photographic cutouts of a deployed soldier inserted into the family while the soldier is at war, I created Flat Granny. Flat Granny and Me: The everyday things is the first of a series of moving image installations in which I animate the still photographs taken of my grandmother while she was alive.
Flat Granny and Me: The everyday things
When I rushed into the Emergency Room that afternoon she was sitting upright on the bed surrounded by family. My eyes met hers and for a brief moment her face widened in a gasp and then melted into the distinct look of awe. “You’re so beautiful”, she said in a long drawn out southern way. “Have you come for me?” Then suddenly shifting her thoughts, she gasped, “Oh David, look, everyone is here! Hurry, get out the cake; let’s have some ice cream.” From across the emergency room, I heard my father reply, “Okay, Mama.”
During the final days of my grandmother’s life she drifted delicately in the space between lucid thought and fantasy. She lay in a bed of white, encircled by a ring of white curtains in the Intensive Care Unit at Flowers Hospital. Over the final two weeks of her life the strokes would continue claiming most of her energy and the use of the muscles throughout her body and finally she would become too weak to breath.
Showing signs of improvement, the doctor requested that an Occupational Therapist visit her room to work on teaching her how to once again perform the everyday things like feeding herself, taking her clothes off and putting them back on. I visited her on the evening following her first lesson.
Walking into the curtained room, I found grandmother-sitting upright in her hospital bed with a blanket covering her face. From beneath I heard her say, “David, David, did I get it?” My father, who had not left her side since she was admitted, sat cross-legged across the room, his eyes closed, his chin resting in his hand. Through a cloud of exhaustion he replied, “Yeah, Mama, you got it.” After which her body began to wriggle, the fabric shifting as her two working fingers began inching the blanket back down her face and into her lap. She spent most of the evening this way, the blanket creeping up over her head and then down again.
