My father's death was the most difficult thing I’ve had to deal with in my life, not only because of anger or sadness, but because of how unprepared I was for what happens when someone dies. I was left alone to deal with the incredibly overwhelming legal and financial responsibilities, and confronted by the fact that I had never heard anyone talk about the things that must be done after someone dies—I’d never thought about terminating a dead person’s phone plan.
With this, I have created a series of paintings that comment on family, death, and loss. The paintings, paired with real-life photos and artifacts from my and my family’s life, provoke the confusion often felt after a loved one dies when time starts to alter your memory of them. The space is centered around my own experiences with loss and the responsibilities that come after it, yet tailored for the viewer's experience, including elements that allow them to situate themselves in my environment. I am choosing to display the past, present, and future of death. One wall represents the past via a family photo wall, the middle wall represents death in and of itself—a painting of my father’s lonely viewing, and the third wall represents what lies after death: pain, emptiness, isolation, and lots of paperwork.
Death is a scary subject, and responsibility is even scarier, so I chose to take my struggles and turn them into a learning opportunity so that others can be more prepared for the harsh reality of postmortem bureaucracy. Because grief is often the only thing thought of after someone dies, I chose to highlight the painstaking materiality of the death and dying process.
