Between July and September of 2012, I spent time each week providing end-of-life care for Hannah Burr's artwork Fresh Eyes at Boston's Museum of Fine Arts. There was not enough staffing available to attend to the piece's daily needs towards the end of its time there, so I volunteered to perform this role during the last several weeks of the piece's existence.
The documentation here includes a few action shots of my performance, some images from the de-installation of Fresh Eyes, and the ephemera of the project: my identification badge, a terrycloth dusting rag full of art-dust, and a few pages from the museum education materials that I used to help me process my experiences.
Though I planned the piece with Hannah in May of 2012, right in the middle of this project, in August, my father passed away after many years of ill health. I was originally planning to explore the museum's ability to allot space but not care for Hanna's work, and to perform the service of cleaning it, but the piece ended up being as much about hospice and end-of-life work as cleaning work.
The performance documentation is in black and white because I wanted to capture my work in the way that the museum's security cameras would.
(Performance.) Photo credit: Hannah Burr.