thisisdisappearing is a project initiated by local Minneapolis artist Lauren Herzal-Bauman. The following is a description of the project in her own words:
As part of my Artist Initiative Grant from the Minnesota State Arts Board, I proposed to rent a house and turn the entire space into an installation about how death and loss affects the home. The City of Minneapolis has rented me a home that has been foreclosed and condemned. It sits empty and boarded, with no utilities. Upon the completion of my work in the house, it will be demolished.
I will be photographing, installing, sitting, and making work in the house in the coming weeks. I have invited other artists to join me. Please take part in the end of this house’s life and join us at the opening and closing while we make work.Kindly,Lauren Herzak-Bauman
For my participation in the project I was given a room upstairs and 3 weeks to create an installation titled, Bright and Fading, A Long Goodbye.
When people die, they become hyper-real as our collective memories add to the person they were. I will be creating a mural of my deceased grandmother. Beginning with a digital template, I will add then subtract from the image, applying and removing color and material. The process reminds me of how loss and grief affects our lives immediately and changes over time. As the memory of a person fades what is left in our minds is an aggregate of who the person was to us and who we have imagined them to be. This installation will chronicle the arc of how I have experienced my grandmother’s death. At first memories are additive, swelling with detail. However, what will remain at the end is a faded memoir, bright in some places, evermore vacant in others.
Over the course of the installation period I have been adding to the walls, beginning with digital imagery and enlarged pieces of my grandmother’s journals discovered by my aunt and I after her death. The digital images and exact duplications are flat reductions of her existence. It is with the addition of color, hand drawn elements, and other items that fill the space of the room that I am bringing her memory to life. As the residency comes to an end I will begin to scrape away parts of the imagery, as a way of representing the way memories fade in the mind. To me the work will never be “finished”, it is a continual work that will fade into nothing when the house is demolished. Over the course of the project I am documenting the progression of the room as it swells with detail and color and then begins an entropic decline, fading into memory.