The truth is a pathless land

Katherine Mitchell DiRico on the creation of "Sundowning" at Lamont Gallery

(Video documentation by Sue Murad unless otherwise noted)

We navigate each day from the deep sea of our own consciousness. A place where past merges with present, where emotions cast the world outside in shifting colors, where what we think we know regularly yet shockingly collides with something outside ourselves. Katherine Mitchell DiRico’s installations give form to that deeply sensate realm where perception hits awareness before meaning locks things down.

Katherine uses video, light, sound, drawing, and optics to create environments that express the magic and vagaries of consciousness and perception. For installations, her works are extraordinarily intimate. Material details like bits of paper, or stretched or tangled filaments, anchor the revery of light and sound, calling a viewer into personal relationship: What’s this? Something solid?

In the past, I’ve associated Katherine’s work with the perceptual experience of a newborn before the armature of meaning gets built. She created her installation “Sundowning” in “THROUGH LINE,” a show about incremental mark making at Phillips Exeter Academy’s Lamont Gallery (through Nov. 23), as she manages her mother’s dementia. Katherine witnesses her mother drift away from consensus reality, and lose the meaning-making that tethers us to each other and society. She fashions new tethers, trying to maintain the connection they’ve always shared.

Narratives don’t fit Katherine’s pieces because her art embodies that internal space in which time doesn’t exist. Her abstract installations do not tell stories. But that sea from which we all spring allows for paradox and metaphor in a way that our our agreed-upon reality, a structure built from toothpicks and Scotch tape that keeps chaos at bay, does not. Is “Sundowning” about Katherine’s experience with her mother? It's so much more than that. Yet that story is a precious piece of this work, as much as mylar and video and lights make up its ineffable substance, and as much as a surrender to process guided its making.

Katherine writes: