By Kelly M. Gross
Director, The David Strawn Art Gallery
The Art Association of Jacksonville is pleased to welcome artist Benjamin Kaplan to The David Strawn Art Gallery, 331 W College Ave. in Jacksonville, March 2-30. An opening reception will be held on Saturday, March 2 from 6-8 p.m., with “Gallery Talk” by Kaplan at 6:30 p.m. The opening reception and gallery hours are free and open to the public.
Benjamin Kaplan is a post-disciplinary artist living and working in St. Louis and is best known for his narrative-driven work Documentia, an exhibition that explores the dementia mind.
Kaplan says: “Documentia visualizes the compression, the overlap, the incongruous conversations between memory and sense that occur in that human container. This exhibit invites viewers to contemplate their own stories and sense memories to consider how they organize shards of experience into novel constructions.”
For Kaplan, dementia is described in many ways; forgetfulness, absent-mindedness, senility, and mental decay. Words did not matter as he watched his grandfather decline over 10 years and his grandmother over five and subsequently, his father over the past four years.
Kaplan indicated that as family members and caretakers navigate the shifts in personality, manage paranoia, and witness the way our loved one’s brains crowd out new memories in favor of a continuous loop of past recollections.
He says, “I watched my grandparents and then my father regress into their younger selves, believing everyone to be either family or enemy or both, communicating sense and emotion as vividly as when they were children.”
He goes on to elaborate: “These moments always catch present-day loved ones by surprise. Perhaps best described as hallucinations, the seemly coherent becomes compressed within the twisted confines of a declining mind.”
Kaplan’s show Documentia is a series of digital collages inspired by and in direct response to the recollective narratives. It is a body of work created in celebration of the dementia mind.
Gallery hours March 3-30 are Sundays from 1-3 p.m. and Tuesday through Saturday from 4-6 p.m.
