Let’s discuss grief.
Or, as tends to be the case, let’s not.
“I think people feel like they’re being a burden by talking about it,” Baldwin Borough resident Amanda Filippelli said. “But it affects every single one of us, especially after covid, whether it’s a person or their job or their financial situation or the state of the world.”
She hopes to provide a space to encourage mutual commiseration with her art installation that opens March 10 at Atithi Studios in Sharpsburg.
The Remembering Room actually is a series of four rooms, representing various states of mind that Filippelli experienced in the midst of two unexpected, life-altering occurrences.
On June 5, 2021, her father, Don Filippelli of Whitehall, died at age 61 of heart failure.
“He woke up that morning and took my mom to work. He went to Lowe’s. He bought tomato plants. He changed the oil in his car. He cut half the grass,” she said. “And then he sat down on the porch to take a rest.”
Amanda had been teaching a writing class when her mother, Kelly, requested that she stop by the house to check on him.
“Two weeks later,” Amanda said, “I found out I was pregnant.”
As she and her husband, Ryan Hertrich, anticipated the birth of a son they named River, Amanda attempted to cope with the changes.
“There was just this living between two really strange worlds, of being in such deep grief and pain, but also wanting to feel such joy and anticipation and excitement for this new baby,” she recalled. “All of that mixed together was really, really difficult.”
Around the time River turned six months old, she began to concentrate more fully on addressing the loss of her father by developing the concept of the Remembering Room.
“Yes, I want to honor my dad,” she said. “But I really want to create a space where other people can openly talk about grief and can go through kind of what I went through, my perspective, and hopefully find some healing of their own with this installation.”
Its four sections are sequential, starting with the Desert Room, symbolizing “the initial shock of feeling the loss of someone,” Filippelli said. “This is dealing with me finding my dad and dealing with that surreal time period in the beginning, where you just can’t process it. I spent so much time trying to convince myself, maybe that didn’t happen. Maybe if I just call him, he’s there.”
Next is Mnemosyne’s Room, named after the Greek goddess of time and focusing on memories. Then comes the Tree Room, with a sculpture “representative of my pregnancy and dealing with the things that I needed to let go and change to be a good mother,” the artist said. “People can come and put things inside of it that they want to let go of, and grow and change and evolve.”
The final section is the Astral Room, featuring a mannequin covered in black fabric and seated in a rowboat. The effect is reminiscent of the boatman on the River Styx as a connection to the afterlife, and by extension, a continuing link between Filippelli and her father.
“I actually made all of this out of my dad’s old clothes,” she said about the mannequin’s adornments, including parts of a particularly endearing article: “This was his leather jacket he wore all the time.”
She also tapped into his massive collection of nostalgic items for elements of the installation.
“I took some of my favorite pieces of his — some of them were his favorite pieces — and I cut them up to put into this exhibit. And it was the most emotional experience. I didn’t think it was going to affect me as deeply as it did,” Filippelli said. “But I think it was a good thing. I think he would have wanted them to be turned into something new.”
Examples include the Starship Enterprise, Spiderman, Iron Man, the Incredible, Hulk and Robby the Robot from “Forbidden Planet” and/or “Lost in Space,” plus a model Don built of a certain popular Marvel Cinematic Universe character.
“This Wolverine I had the hardest time with, because he loved Wolverine,” his daughter said. “And this one was so nicely done. He spent so much time on him. But that also made it more meaningful and important to me.”
After its opening, the Remembering Room will be on display at Atithi Studios through April 16. A workshop on creating art to aid in grief-related healing is scheduled for April 2.
For more information, visit amandafilippelli.com/the-remembering-room.
Harry Funk is a Tribune-Review news editor. You can contact Harry at hfunk@triblive.com.