Upkeep

I’m looking for something small and slight, yet too precious to miss. I don’t know what it is, yet the search has become part of the work. I’ve narrowed my focus to emptiness, light, a moment of pause, the routine of upkeep and/or a loving gesture.

When I was twenty, I broke my neck in a car crash and afterwards was confined to bed for almost a year during which time I read a lot. There were two big windows on the left side of the room that formed rectangles of light on the wall directly across from the windows. While reading, I was always aware of the floating passing ness of these rectangles of light. The room I was in was pretty empty as I didn’t have my stuff with me in that room. The quiet and the light and the story that I was reading was what I had. My parents were both refugees who had to leave all their possessions behind in Europe. Afterwards my mother had no attachment to things except for her paintings, the ones she had painted. In contrast my father was overly attached to everything. I think about this often. My mother died in an empty room with two windows on the left side of her bed in summertime. It took hours for the sun to set, during which time I sat by her bedside. I like taking pictures during sunset and feeling the pressure of losing the sunlight one more time. These are essential experiences linked to why emptiness and light are recurring themes in my work.