necessary man involved five large paintings and a bookwork. The paintings were a response to my experience as a homecare worker in Montreal. I had a client named Tadeusz Sypniewski who had Alzheimer’s Syndrome. Over the 18 months that I helped care for Tadeusz I tried to understand his memory loss and other symptoms. necessary man represents an effort to create a visual experience that paralleled my experience with Tadeusz. In retrospect I realize that my interest in Tadeusz arose from a feeling of empathy I felt with him - a comprehension of the desire to be understood and remembered as important. The images in these paintings are from photographs in which I played the main character and were orchestrated to represent the stories that Tadeusz had repeated over and over again. The visual experience of the paintings is meant to impart a sense of calm confusion, slight anxiety and mild depression.
The paintings were designed to fit in the five architecturally defined surfaces of the gallery in which they were initially installed, and they are the same gray colour as the gallery floor. There are a series of vignettes involving an individual but they are difficult to understand sequentially. The fractured narrative is framed by the beginning and the end of WW II, the period of time that seemed the most concrete to Tadeusz. Because of their size, physical movement through space is required to apprehend the paintings and their surface changes depending on one’s point of view. From one angle, the space in a painting can seem very deep, while from another the image appears etched onto a thin, brittle surface.
The paintings were designed to fit in the five architecturally defined surfaces of the gallery in which they were initially installed, and they are the same gray colour as the gallery floor. There are a series of vignettes involving an individual but they are difficult to understand sequentially. The fractured narrative is framed by the beginning and the end of WW II, the period of time that seemed the most concrete to Tadeusz. Because of their size, physical movement through space is required to apprehend the paintings and their surface changes depending on one’s point of view. From one angle, the space in a painting can seem very deep, while from another the image appears etched onto a thin, brittle surface.