ArtWORK > Mini-retrospective

Installation view of the series NEW SKIN FOR THE OLD CEREMONY from the mini-retrospective:
Doreen Wittenbols
Performative Painting: LOOK PAINT REPEAT + International Passport Paintings
June 1 - September 2, 2024
Gallery 235
Harbourfront centre, Toronto, CANADA

New Skin for the Old Ceremony

The wall installation New Skin for the Old Ceremony (a Leonard Cohen album title) is an ongoing series of paintings and artworks inspired by a decorative plate with a fairytale image of a wedding couple. The plate belonged to my grandmother; it was an anniversary gift that once hung on the wall of her bedroom. It came into my possession when she unwillingly had to move into a nursing home due to dementia.

My experience of my grandmother’s wrenching transition into the final phase of her life, together with my fond memories of her and the keepsake of the plate, gave rise to an ongoing project of reworking the image of the plate and exploring concepts of memory and loss, vulnerability, and traditional roles within a changing society.

The plate’s romanticized “bride and groom” image of heterosexual marriage led me to reflect on how we are groomed to fit into society. I meditated on what is considered conventional and acceptable, and on the need to break down these traditional views and to talk about the pain and hurt experienced in the queer community—especially given the rise of “Trumpism” in which some people freely voice their censure of the LGBTQIA+ community. Instead of moving forward, we seem to be taking steps backwards.

The wall installation is a nostalgic display of “plates,” placed into the home space as they would be proudly displayed in the china cabinet of a traditional Dutch family room, where dinners featured table linens and embroidered napkins, where domestic customs were upheld, and where children were taught table manners and other “proper” social behaviors. My grandmother’s surfeit of linens, which she kept for many years while living alone, inspired the wall installation and are commemorated by it.

Upon closer examination, the cabinet that anchors this domestic tableau is hardly an heirloom piece. Constructed from cardboard, the material of moving boxes, it takes me back to the heartbreaking moment when my grandmother was displaced from her beloved apartment to a memory care facility due to advanced Alzheimer’s and dementia. My dad and aunt lovingly tried to decorate her new place just as her apartment had been. She died within two weeks after several falls, and sometimes I wonder if this half-familiar living arrangement—a strange replica of her old space—contributed to these accidents.

In a turn of events that felt evocative of my grandmother’s fate, the plate she bequeathed me was partially damaged after I acquired it, and I have taken the broken pieces and reworked them for this particular installation. The original image is transformed through abstraction: the genders are blurred; the shards become painted abstract shapes, primarily on vintage napkins stretched over wooden embroidery hoops and also on vintage mirrors.

I adapted the plate’s color palette to create irregular green triangles and jagged peach-colored strips. In this fractured form, the plate’s imagery exists in harmony with a set of napkins (and accompanying instructions) referencing the “napkin toss,” a celebratory ritual that started in a New Orleans gay bar and spread across the world to queer dance clubs in Amsterdam. A shattered plate and an unfurled napkin become protective new skins of healing and renewal. It’s the same old body, but something is different: it’s the same old fight, but one has to continue to adjust. A new skin for an old ceremony.

-Doreen Wittenbols

Photo: LF Documentation