IRENE DELKA MCCRAY EXHIBIT RECEPTION

Date and Time for this Past Event

Saturday, May 11, 2024 5pm - 7pm

Location

Details

Artist Remarks: 5:30pm
Main Gallery:
McCray paints her mother on large canvases, the images much larger than life, to acknowledge her enormous impact, as well as to focus on the beautiful and complex profundities of wizened old flesh. The exhibition is meant to remind and connect members of the community in mutual familiarity to their own experiences with elderly loved ones.
“These paintings and drawings reflect on my mother in her final months with Alzheimer’s,” states McCray. “The work honors her imaginal journeying that lengthens my life backwards in favor of her long ago, and respects the reversal of trust, from me in her to her in me. Even with a lifetime of experience with the strength of my mother’s character, it’s her end years that impress me the most.”
“I am also meaning this work to encourage visibility of our elders and oppose a general cultural attitude of dismissal of the old, which, among many other injustices, was brought to light during the covid pandemic. The slow and indifferent response to our old ones being very vulnerable in care homes prompts me to paint and draw my mom from memory, imagination, and photos taken of her through windows during the lockdown. To think that elders are insignificant in this world consumed with productivity and usefulness is unjust and offensive, as longevity is its own state of being, holding meaning and discovery in layers of lasting. As the old pull themselves in, they expand us out to connections with lost threads of a cultural past, presenting for us what and who we arrive out of.
The beautiful and complex profundities of wizened old flesh seem to me to take on a likeness to leaf veins, so I make those pairings in some of the work, which returns her in my mind to the expansive mystery of nature and the all.”