CHICAGO – A boy who goes to school with my children was killed two weeks ago. He was 11 years old, the star of the next school musical, very kind and cheerful with everyone, and he died trying to protect his mother from an attacker who entered their house with the intention of harming her. The situation was neither random nor unexpected. The mother had repeatedly threatened the man, who had spent years in prison for domestic battery and other charges, and had an active protective order in place.
So it was with a very heavy heart that I saw Selva Aparicio’s solo exhibition, In memory, opened at the DePaul Art Museum the day after this tragedy happened in my community. The choice of show to watch was deliberate. Aparicio is the emerging master of the memorial genre, which includes, yes, all those white men on horseback, but also the weight and graceful elegance of Maya Lin’s Vietnam Memorial and Doris Salcedo’s installation of chairs, concrete and shoes. , hair and grass. At his best—there’s no doubt about it—Aparicio’s artwork is of that caliber, offering a compassionate focus for grief.
In memory of This is the first solo museum exhibition of the artist, who was born in Barcelona in 1987 and grew up in a forest house outside of Barcelona. In interviews, he describes his childhood as chaotic and free. It witnessed domestic violence and questionable relationships between children and adults, the drowning of a best friend, influential artistic mentorship, and deep immersion in the natural world of plants and animals. Her parents were proto-hippies and her grandfather, in whose hospice house she lived for a year, was the only obstetrician-gynecologist in her area at a time when death from childbirth was on the rise. Aparicio moved to Vancouver in 2011, where he studied English and worked as a stonemason before going to Chicago for art school on a scholarship. Before graduating, he was hit by a truck; post-recovery he enrolled at Yale, where he spent much of his MFA working with cadavers in the medical school’s anatomy lab. She currently lives in Chicago with her partner and their five-year-old son, who is now healthy, although both mother and child nearly died from complications during his birth. Aparicio comes by his engagement with death and trauma honestly.
What that devotion looks like can be incredibly beautiful. And traditionally traditional: the first work visitors encounter in the museum is a huge rose window hanging in the lobby, glowing with natural light and visible across the museum’s facade. “Remnants” faithfully reproduces the opening of the central stained-glass window of the Basilica of Santa Maria del Pico – the largest in Catalonia and destroyed at least twice – but it does so with old lettuce leaves, inserted between Plexiglas sheets and tracery cut on oil panel. The produce market in the neighborhood of Aparicio threw lettuce in 2013; he collected, dried and stored it, using delicate veins, translucency and faded greens and browns to create a convincing imitation of colored glass. The effect is as transcendent as any I’ve experienced, sitting in a synagogue or visiting a church, all the more so because it’s composed of humble, dilapidated materials. Standing up, they pray gracefully for the outcasts.
Aparicio treats unwanted items with great sensitivity, personally collecting and storing them over many years, eventually refurbishing them with incredible vision. This practice sometimes produces disturbing results: dozens of wasps’ nests fill the interior of an upright piano in “Time’s Refrain,” replacing difficult musical potential with a threat of extinction. Hundreds of honeysuckle thorns poke menacingly into the fabric of a white crochet blanket, protecting whoever is tucked under it, but at a cost. A false move also places the bearer.
“Echoes of Resilience” shows 41 examples of this rethinking practice in a neat grid of organic wall-mounted assemblages. Bits of moss, seed pods, animal hides, innards, and wormwood are paired and vaguely triangular, as they must be to fit their new purpose: adorable prosthetics for Momo, the artist’s beloved cat, whose ears were removed. to the disease Momo died in 2018 and was taxidermied; he is close, glassy eyes looking at his listening ornaments. Morbid? Yes, I think so. But also a remarkable heart, insisting on remembering the dead and loved ones.
Aparicio sometimes creates works of art that are incredibly laborious. In memory of it includes a mourning veil, the kind traditionally worn by widows, made up of 1,365 individual winged cigars of 17 years old, sewn from the hair of the artist, his mother and his niece. Long hair hangs down, as if caught somewhere between the duties and realities of loss. “Ode to the Unclaimed Dead,” an artwork not on display, is a plywood casket, mounted in an inset niche reminiscent of Spanish burial rites, covered with hundreds of thousands of individually placed dandelion seeds, whose skins create an aura of sanctity. For “Childhood Memories,” Aparicio inserted the rug from his mother’s house directly into the gallery floorboards, a process that continues for the duration of the exhibition, deepening and transforming the memories of that object – and presumably the actions that took place around it – as they do with each recollection. The excellent results of all this effort defend its therapeutic effectiveness, while sharing some of the benefits of this constant work with the viewer.
The exhibition, curated by Ionit Behar, is organized as a domestic suite. In a front room is a wooden rocking chair covered in a pointed blanket, a cicada veil framed on the wall. The central gallery has a carpet and a piano, with a cat perched on it, ears next to it. At the back is a dark chamber furnished with bed sculptures. Outside these areas are two common areas, one with a rose window, the other with a weathered bench. A small bronze plaque nailed to the chair omits the specific dedications printed on such things, simply: “IN MEMORY OF.” I sat for a long time.
Selva Aparicio: In memory It continues at the DePaul Art Museum (935 West Fullerton Avenue, Chicago, Illinois) through August 4. The exhibition was directed by Ionit Behar.
