ELLIE BROWN
HOLDING ON TO A DEAR LIFE
Artist Spotlight: Ellie Brown
Sundown
AS220 Main Gallery
115 Empire Street Providence, Rhode Island
December 1-29, 2018
by Meredith Cutler
Article excerpt:
Alzheimer’s. A word that conjures up images of fear, isolation, confusion, and loss. In the United States today, 5.7 million Americans are living with Alzheimer’s. By 2050, this number is projected to rise to nearly 14 million.
Terminal illness is a painful topic — but this one strikes home for me. My father was recently, finally diagnosed with Alzheimer’s, after years of ambiguous labels assigned to his memory loss and declining capacity to care for himself. I sat down with photographer and mixed media artist Ellie Brown to talk about Alzheimer’s, fathers and daughters, and art as a means of documenting, unpacking and transforming this disease.
Brown’s upcoming show “Sundown,” at AS220 in Providence, encompasses all of these things. Brown’s own father, a tall, friendly and robust guy known for his love of music and acting, was diagnosed with early onset Alzheimer’s in 2015 after years of ambiguous dementia. Then based in Philadelphia, she soon thereafter moved her life to Rhode Island in order to be closer to him and to make the most of the time they had left.
“When I found out my father had early onset Alzheimer’s disease, it was my first instinct to photograph and document everything — as I do — partly to document the disease, but also to have my own personal record of my father,” recounted Brown.
“It [soon] became clear to me that my father wasn’t comfortable with having his straight photographic image on my website, and that other members of my family weren’t comfortable [either]. So, I took a step back and stopped photographing him. I started making gel medium transfers with the images I had already taken. My instincts told me to start drawing into them. And what happened was, I was able to get at the nuances of the disease that I wasn’t able to with straight photographs.”
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Image caption: Ellie Brown, Garage, 2016, mixed media on paper, 9” x 12”.
