disaster [place]

2021 | an installation
Charcoal and India ink on paper, occasionally with candles, clothing rack, found clothes, curtains, electrical tape, and tea service
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disaster [place] is a sparse world of memory and loss.

Created with the spare materials of charcoal and paper, the installation was made over two years, 2019 to 2021, primarily in the mountains of upstate New York.

Sheet by sheet, the work considers ideas of multiplicity, multiverse, and spaces of possibility, as well as loss, softness, and localized disaster. At once a provocation and an envelope, disaster [place] poses words and phrases in a poetic hopscotch inviting the viewer to leap into memory traveling from universe to universe to bed to [ ].

Embodiment is material: allowance, specificity, and handwork sit beneath charcoal and paper, as do fragment, interruption, repetition, hinge, and omission. There is movement - it lives.

Made with support from Arts On Site R&R in Kerhonkson, NY.

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disaster [place] Backstory
On a visit to the mountains, I got an itch to write. To scrawl, really. I wanted to write really, really big on a big piece of paper. I wanted the feeling of going big and free and loose. I rolled out some craft paper on the kitchen floor, got on my knees, swept across the giant page with a screeching piece of charcoal. The sound was horrible. It looked and felt just as I’d hoped and, to my surprise, the words had fallen just perfectly in a tumbling way. That sweep became the first piece of disaster [place], the large brown sheet muse-hollering what I would like to say about this place is

Over the next two years I had more to say about “this place.” Never content with the known universe yet endlessly fascinated by those created between two people, I mused and proposed, repeated and repeated, adjoined, insisted, and imagined from inside an out-of-body curiosity about what happens when ___________. Never lonely, I always had you to talk to. Never bored, I had a gazillion universes to ask after. Rarely have I felt so free in the act of creation. Everything is proposed and indicated. Very little is said outright but ultimately, in the wide net of words, spaces, and leaps, everything is said, is it not?

disaster [place] is an infinite world at once deeply internal and entirely expansive. It is personal, of course, and if you aren’t an atheistic semi-content post-modern existentialist, it can come off sadder than I mean it. Even if you are one, it can still be a little sad. But also peaceful, spacious, and with room to breathe, I hope.

This body of work grew and grew over many mountain visits until one day, reclining in a grid on the floor, it was complete. With just enough of everything - each word, formulation, interaction (there is an interactive part!) - it as much as told me “I’m finished.” An intuitive experience from beginning to end, with endless invitations to loop through non-linear time, I thought well, alright and I got to work bringing it forward.

Press
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