Vadis Turner’s “Burial Party”

“Burial Party” www.vadisturner.com

Vadis Turner is a Brooklyn artist who creates mixed-media sculptures, paintings, and installations with a colorful and whimsical take on various cultural and personal issues. Her most recent installation, Burial Party, was included last April at the Brooklyn Artists Ball at the Brooklyn Museum.

According to the artist’s statement, her creation of Burial Party was inspired by an interest in “the aesthetic bridges between diverse rites of passage”. At significant turning points throughout our lives, we must simultaneously shed what we knew or what we were, and embody a new version of ourselves.

“A new identity is conceived. An old identity dies.”

Throughout life, we are regularly faced with these periods or moments of transition: coming of age, relationship commitments, career moves, raising children, loss, illness, end of life. For some of those moments, we tend as a culture to focus on the “new identity”. When we think of events like graduation, marriage, childbirth, and promotions, we celebrate the changes, welcome what we perceive as positive additions to our lives and our character. However, when we face events like the loss of a loved one or approaching our own death, we tend to mourn the loss of the “old identity”, recognizing that something of who we were before is lost.

“Burial Feast” www.vadisturner.com

I commend Turner for recognizing the complexity of these events that we often classify so simply. Burial Party acknowledges that with all of life’s events we experience both losses and gains. When facing death and grief throughout our lives, we must acknowledge that while we bid farewell to an identity we knew, we will simultaneously greet a new identity, and grow through our loss. Similarly, when we face life’s struggles like illness and aging, we can approach them with the understanding that while some of the abilities or characteristics that we hold central to our identities may fade, we will certainly move forward to conceive strong new identities.

For Burial Party, Turner pulled together elements of ceremony and celebration with the processes of decay. The installation features the vague form of a decaying figure covered in ribbons and balloons. The colors are bright, rather than the solemn, muted tones that often come to mind when thinking of loss. The pieces very simply display the competing ideas of celebration and mourning, and the statement made is very intriguing: these ideas, in reality, do co-exist. Celebration and loss must not be mutually exclusive.