Render, rend, surrender
Diana Zipeto on painting her father's Alzheimer's diagnosis
Making art is a way to contend with things we may never be able to make sense of because this world is often too much for our minds to grasp. So when Diana Zipeto’s father received an Alzheimer’s disease diagnosis, she tried to get her arms around what was going on by painting large-scale canvases of MRIs of his brain. Her exhibition “Inner Workings” is up at Western Avenue Studios in Lowell through June 8.
There is so much mystery in a loved one’s dementia. As their cognition fades, their identity shifts – how we have always known them, and the dynamics of our relationship with them. Maybe fault lines are exposed. Certainly, balances of care change.
Simply painting these images didn’t satisfy Diana, as she describes below. The enigma of her father’s disease remained – and maybe of her father himself. Our parents are never truly who we think they are. Our perceptions of them steep and simmer in how they reflected us as children, and how they did not. Part of the work of being an adult is making space for your parents to be who they are. Art is one place to do that.
As she worked over the paintings, Diana used magnets to affix strips of canvas and bits of metal hardware from her father’s workshop to her rendering of his brain. There’s an intimacy to this act that’s different from translating the literal image from an MRI into a painting. The canvas and magnets might be symbols of Diana and her father, tangible things to touch and compose as she contemplates his slow disappearance and comes to terms with who he has been to her.
Diana’s still working on this project, and so there’s a twist at the end of this process narrative, as she takes us from the painting above into her next material exploration. I’m grateful to her for putting such personal work into the world, and sharing about it here.
Diana writes:
When I started my MRI series, my dad had just been diagnosed with Alzheimer’s - or “possible Alzheimer’s” as it can never be fully diagnosed until the person passes and you can physically see the damage in their brain. There was tremendous fear, uncertainty, and confusion in our family around the diagnosis.