Forget It

30" x 62" x1"

Oil paint, reclaimed charcoal from the Eaton Canyon fire, reclaimed stretcher bars

How do we hold a fading memory and an unrecognizable future? What is place? What makes it mine? What is home? Who am I when everything I have physically constructed my identity out of burns to the ground over night? Does stuff have a soul?

Taking in the unrecognizable reality of the now there is an overwhelming desire to go back and be within a memory. Memory which is only an abstraction. The viewer is forced to accept that while they can try, they cannot properly take in the image behind the indiscernible wreckage of what is presented to them.

This work began with the two horizontal support bars so aged and damaged they had to be forced together with two new supports to be functional. This imperfect support, forcing together old with new puts the experience of living with grief on display. What is visible is the new uncomfortable reality and the temptation to keep returning to a tightly held past within the narrowing perspective of memory.