Beethoven Mama

Andrew Frost

When Japanese artist Tatsumi Orimoto’s father died in the 1990s he began to take care of his aged mother – and to include her in his artworks. Beethoven Mama, a video work now screening at Mosman Art Gallery, is part of an ongoing collaboration between the artist and his mother, a body of work that includes photography, drawings and poster works that explore in unnerving and unsentimental detail the effects of dementia.

In the video piece Orimoto tousles his mothers hair as she sits on a stool within a cubicle papered with calendar pages. Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony can be heard on the soundtrack, as can the amplified sounds of the artist’s fingers caressing his mother’s hair. As this minimal action is repeated for the duration of the work, the mother’s face changes in expression. Orimoto’s work feels both intimate and exposed, a simple act elevated to a symbol of communication with someone no longer able to communicate except in the simplest terms. Given that dementia is often a inherited issue, the work is also supremely autobiographical as the artist – and the viewer – contemplates how much time we have left before the world we understand disappears.

Until January 5

Mosman Art Gallery, Mosman

http://mosmanartgallery.org.au

Pic: Tatsumi Orimoto, Beethoven Mama, 2012.