Monica DeSalvo’s “A Bus Tour in the Woods” Exhibition

A Bus Tour in the Woods: Visual Duets with Her Father

Monica DeSalvo’s series “A Bus Tour in the Woods” was influenced by a recent trip to Greece for an art-making workshop on the island of Skopelos. There she found a path toward creating works inspired by one of the hallucinations her late father, Sal, had during his waning health and waxing dementia. Caring for Sal at the end of his life had already prompted DeSalvo to explore dementia by using mixed media and collage to illustrate his perspectives and visually preserve their shared experiences. His recounting of this tale had filled her head with enchanting images for some time.

DeSalvo’s often-segmented or diptych compositions are a natural device for expressing the caregiving dyad and the dueling realities of a mind fragmented by dementia, or a mind straddling this physical world and what lies ahead at the end of life.…