In 2004, Galesburg’s Maytag Manufacturing plant closed. The factory workers who made the last refrigerators bought three, signed them, and wrote “ THE LAST TOP MOUNT REFRIGERATORS PRODUCED IN GALESBURG, ILLINOIS WITH ‘PRIDE’ BY MEMBERS OF IAM LOCAL 2063 SEPT 14TH , 2004.”
Observing this as a child, Moreno watched a site become defined by a narrative of industrial manufacturing’s exodus. A narrative of absence set in, charged with the discomfort of inhabiting a vacuum’s negative space. “Galesburg, a good place to die” rode on cars’ bumpers. He asked “what does it mean to grow up in the end? What happens after the end?”
The works in Alloy began with formally asking these questions in 2014 and continue to be generative.
To cut, to grind, to cast, to repair, to strip, to cover, to transfer, to transport, to arrange, to bandage… building things underscores an ambiguity around material endings and beginnings. A woodworker’s labor begins with a tree’s ending: to extend the life of a body with its own graining, subtle coloring, an aura, that will exist this once—never to reappear. The tree’s body is a substance with unique fault lines that informs what the woodworker will do. It is saturated with inheritances.
Responding to refrigerators accordingly, Moreno approaches them as a site to linger with the emergence of industrial nostalgia as a persistent animating sentiment within American social life. Can the capacities of craftsmanship—a repertoire of skills and ethics — both acknowledge such loss and critique the desires for return? What do these objects have to say as sculpture that persists, fails, and cultivates a beauty from having lived? As a fallen tree is stewarded into new form, the symbolic fault lines of refrigerators are rendered legible so they might be alloyed anew.
Dia de Muertos is a moment to remember those who have passed and meditate upon our own capacities for memory. The Alzheimer's Association in collaboration with Gabriel Moreno connected with caregivers in 2023 who lost family members to Alzheimer’s/Dementia and listened to their stories. Sharing oral histories, family photographs, and prized objects, they have been assembled into an ofrenda that honors their lives.
Each lived a unique life, yet they shared memory loss: forgetting where they lived, family recipes, and even childrens’ names. To remember home, flavor, and family is to locate ourselves in a recognizable and sensible world. A daughter watched her mother command boardrooms, dining tables, and even city hall— today she leads with the same passion. Another son stoked his father’s memory with favorite songs in the car — now he provides entertainment access in retirement homes as an entrepreneur. Past lives animate our own. Memory is the fuel for such animation. Through remembering another, we can become a little more recognizable to ourselves.
Dia De Muertos asks us to believe in dissolvable boundaries between the living and dead— to acknowledge our immersion within a world inherited from the many who came before. This belief animates an exchange between who we can remember and who we can be.
An elegy to the victims of Alzheimer's/ Dementia can also be a song for a future with a cure.
