PROVIDENCE, R.I. [Brown University] — The death of a loved one presents a dichotomy: they are physically gone yet still very much present in memories, in the shape of other relationships and in the artifacts they have left behind.
It is this paradox that underlies Brown University senior Elysee Barakett’s new exhibition, “Presence of Absence,” a mural on view at the Lindemann Performing Arts Center promenade through May 16.
The project began as a prompt in Brown’s Multimedia Storytelling course last fall, taught by Senior Lecturer in English Michael Stewart, who challenged his students to use images to form a narrative. Barakett immediately thought of a way to depict her brother Lincoln, who was just shy of his third birthday when he died from Sudden Unexplained Death in Childhood (unexplained death in children older than 1 year) in 2020.
Barakett, almost 14 years his elder, says she and her little brother were close from the beginning. She recalls playing music for Lincoln and watching him bob up and down to the beat.
“Being so much older than him, I took on a parental role,” said Barakett, who will earn a bachelor’s degree in international and public affairs later this month. “I remember seeing him dance for the first time, hanging out with him, picking flowers. He was a very sweet kid.”
After creating stamps for the initial class assignment, Barakett continued to explore themes of loss and grief through an independent study with Stewart during the spring semester.
“There was something captivating about it,” Stewart said of the initial idea. “What would it be like to let others engage in this? There were a lot of exciting possibilities there, and so I encouraged her to pursue it.”
The project grew to incorporate more of Barakett’s story and culminated in a mid-April community art workshop to develop the mural for the exhibition.
The stamps she designed for the project feature negative and positive versions of simple figures: in one, the figure is cut out; in the other, the background is removed. 