Work Text:
You push aside the heavy black curtain that covers the gallery entrance and find yourself stepping into a scene of utter ruin. The room is lit mostly in dim blue, with a single low red light in the very middle, and the whole effect is so initially overwhelming that it takes you a few moments to even begin to process what you’ve walked into.
The constructed archway that stands at the center is so tall that you have to crane your neck to see the top of it, and even then you get the sense that there are parts of it you’re missing. The ceilings in the gallery are high by design, but they seem even taller like this. Dark, shimmering fabric spreads out over the white ceiling like an oil spill, bunched up and layered in the middle to create a vanishing point for the archway to disappear into. The arch itself is constructed from mostly rebar, brick, and concrete. The outer edges are uniform, manmade, while the inside edge is rough-hewn and organic. A number of small red bike reflectors are set into the concrete, catching what little light they can and amplifying it, all pointed inward. There to catch the light from the reflectors are countless thin red lines of thread, strung up and tied together like a network of nerves. Thick black cables form a snakelike pattern on the floor, radiating out from the center. They’re coated in some kind of gloss or varnish, which gives them the appearance of being wet to the touch.
The arch itself is caught in a windstorm frozen in time. Chunks of debris, wood, and scrap metal ranging in size from pebbles to boulders are suspended between the ceiling and floor on thin wires, as if floating. Concentrated at the center of the room, mixed in with the chunks of concrete and stone, are countless jagged shards of stained glass. They spin slowly, freely, glittering and catching the light. It’s a moment of impact, the split second after a detonation.
You begin to walk around the perimeter of the room, carefully placing your feet to ensure you don’t trip over any of the cables. There’s something clearly deliberate about how the debris is hung, about the cuts and angles of the glass at the center—well, no. Not at the very center, merely surrounding it. There’s a clear gap in the dead center of the archway. It’s obscured by the amount of glass and rubble, especially upon first glance. But as you walk the edges of the room, you can see some sense beginning to emerge from the controlled chaos.
When you reach the far side of the room, you see it. The gap created by the glass and debris has taken on a distinct shape. It lacks a defined outline, and the way the glass twists in place creates a wavering effect, like you’re trying to make something out through a rain-splattered window. If you unfocus your eyes a little, it becomes easier to see. You’re looking not at a person, but at the negative space created by the lack of one.
Hypocenter, 1993
Brick, mortar, concrete, stone, rebar, found wood, wire cable, fishing line,
silk-blend fabrics, cotton thread, resin, glass, found objects
Some materials sourced from the 1987 explosion at the HPL in Hawkins, IN
You round the corner and step into the next room, which houses four pieces. Three on one wall, one on the opposite. It’s not the dim and oppressive atmosphere of the first room, but the lights are still low. A faint crackle, like static, hums through the space. You can’t see what’s producing the sound.
On the wall directly to your right, there’s a very large painting, three feet tall at least.
It’s a portrait of a young man with brown hair and a mole above his lip. The canvas has been torn right down the middle and only one half of it is displayed, so only half of his face is shown. It’s not a clean break, either; the wood is splintered, the threads frayed, the canvas warped, the paint chipped.
The composition is an almost grotesque close-up of his sobbing face, detailed down to the pore, visceral and vulnerable. He takes up the entire torn canvas, leaving no room for a background. His nose is bright red, and shining snot dribbles from nostrils and over his parted lips. His visible eye is bright and bloodshot, and his mouth is contorted in a wail of agony. Tears hang from his jaw, mingling freely with saliva and mucus. The painting is almost deafening just to look at, like the work itself is screaming.
Irish Goodbye, 1992
Oil on canvas
It’s not the kind of piece most people feel comfortable lingering on. It’s a little too raw, too human, too uncomfortable.
You move along the wall toward the next piece. The static grows a little louder as you walk.
This one is a grid of four paintings, all smaller than a square foot.
The painting on the top right is of an overflowing black laundry bin. The bin itself is rigid fabric on a metal frame, and inside it is an eclectic mix of plain workout clothes, colorful patterns on soft fabrics, and worn flannel shirts. Most of the clothes are securely resting in the bin, but a few dangle over the side, and there’s a single white sock dotted with tiny pink flowers resting on the ground. A thin layer of dust unifies the sock with the floorboards, dulling the hue of both.
The lower right shows a bathroom sink strewn with products. The right side of the sink holds a half-full bottle of lotion, two half-gone perfumes, an open eyeshadow palette and a scattering of colorful dust, a mostly full tube of cinnamon toothpaste, a glittery purple toothbrush, a hairbrush with a small cake of matted brown hair among the bristles, a lip gloss leaking a thin pink line down the side of the bowl, a bright blue bottle of hairspray with a missing lid, and a scattering of colorful hair ties. On the left side of the sink is the handle of a safety razor (without a blade to be seen) and a bottle of shaving foam. There’s a ring of scum built up underneath the bottle, like it hasn’t been lifted in a long time. A mint toothpaste tube stands completely empty, and the yellow toothbrush’s bristles are so worn down that they appear almost flat. The scene is cast in a sickly greenish light, the sink framed in the center and surrounded by chipped tile. Only the bottom edge of the mirror is visible. It has a large crack on the left side.
The one on the lower left is of an open freezer. There’s two ice cube trays, one mostly empty, the other completely full. A large bag of frozen peas, three microwave dinners, a box of cherry popsicles, two rigid ice packs and one flexible one, and an unopened box of fish sticks. There is no room for anything else in the freezer, as the entire back wall is taken up by a stack of Eggo waffles. The boxes are profoundly freezer-burned, to the point where it’s almost impossible to make out the brand name behind the sheer wall of white frost. The freezer is illuminated in the way that a cave often is, like the viewer is angling a flashlight in.
And the top left depicts the shelf at the top of a closet, with a row of hangers lined up beneath. The hangers all bear flannels similar to the ones in the laundry bin, but there’s no overlap between the clothes shown in the two paintings. The focus of the piece is a rolled up canvas, pushed so far toward the back of the shelf that it’s almost unnoticeable and half-hidden behind a cardboard box. It’s tied up with a large pink ribbon, and a gift tag hangs off of it. The lettering is small, but if you lean in close you can make out that it says, Happy 17th Birthday Jane! Love, Will in the tight scrawl of a practiced artist. The whole thing is slightly offset, so the wall to the left of the closet is visible while the wall to the right is not.
Placed neatly in the center of the four paintings is a set of long, ornate clock hands. The minute hand is moving noticeably too slowly, the hour hand far too quickly, and the second hand is frozen at 11:00, permanently casting a shadow over the painted gift tag.
Untouch, 1992
Acrylic on canvas, found clock components
You step away from the clock and drift toward the next work. The static grows even louder, and you can discern now that it’s coming from the open entryway beside this piece, which must lead into the next room. It’s a little distracting.
The piece you’re looking at now is also a painting, more abstract than the previous ones. At first, it looks like it might be a starless night sky. The whole canvas is drenched in rich dark hues that appear black at first glance, but deepen and complicate themselves the longer you spend looking. It has so much depth that it looks more like a window than a flat canvas, like if you could poke your head through the simple wooden frame you’d find yourself looking out over a vast dark expanse. Certain brushstrokes stand out in odd ways, a little more textured, a little thicker, a little more iridescent. Remembering the way you had to approach from behind and blur your vision to make out the silhouette in the first installation, you turn your head from side to side, watching as the paint catches the light in different ways. From one angle, it looks a bit like ripples on the surface of a black pond. From another, you can almost convince yourself you see the shape of a face. But it’s like trying to read shapes in the clouds on a windy day, and each image slips away the moment you spot it. By the time you’ve spent a few minutes staring at it, trying to make out what the hidden image could be, you’re starting to wonder if there’s anything to see at all.
Contact, 1992
Oil on canvas
You move past the entryway and to the other side of the room. The closer you get to the far wall, the quieter the static.
Unlike the previous three paintings, this one isn’t on canvas. It’s an enormous wooden flat, large enough to take up almost the entire wall. It’s an average small town American street lined with businesses, painted entirely in moody blues, purples, and reds. At first glance, the only thing really “off” about it is the fact that the whole thing is upside down. It initially appears like a normal street, if a little overcast and unsettling, but the longer you look at it, the weirder it gets. The lines don’t quite meet in the right places, the shadows look to be cast by contradicting light sources, each building has been drawn with a slightly different vanishing point in mind. In addition to some perfectly ordinary “out to lunch” and “buy one get one free!” postering, a few signs on the shop windows say things like “we’ll fix it together” and “but who can grow me another?” The paint has run down the wood in a few places, like the street itself is melting. The painting overall is not sloppy, not at all. Every single brush stroke is deliberate, every inconsistency precise. The wood is far too big to take in all at once, especially given the size of the room, so you’re forced to walk slowly along and take in the details piecemeal.
Flipped, 1993
Acrylic on wood
You finally turn away and step into the next room, where the lights are brighter than in the previous two. The crackle of static permeates the whole space, and your eyes immediately find the installation at the center.
The floor beneath it sports a glossy black vinyl decal with a watery, organic shape, resembling a large puddle of ink. Right on top of that, there’s a small fort made of scrap wood and large branches. Instead of the lean-to structure typical to childhood forts, this one slowly tapers to a point and then begins to smoothly and neatly transition into a steel lattice tower. Ropes painted to resemble wooden vines lash the two parts of the piece together, climbing the silver metal like it’s been left to grow on its own for years. At the top of the tower is a long antenna with a blinking red light, attached to a radio receiver.
You glance down at your feet and spot another vinyl decal, this one an arrow pointing to the entrance. Taking the instruction for what it is, you lower yourself to your knees and crawl inside.
If you thought the static was loud outside the fort, it’s deafening here. With the pillows and blankets padding the ground, it’s far from uncomfortable. It’s surprisingly structurally sound, and as you look more closely at the walls, you realize that the steel tower goes all the way to the floor, and that the fort has been built up around it. Sitting on the pillows in a place of honor is a large, chunky hand-held radio with a long antenna. The interior walls of the fort are covered in seemingly unrelated objects, so many that you could probably spend fifteen minutes just cataloging them. Some of them are stuck directly to the wood, others hanging from pieces of fishing line, others gathered in small piles on the ground around you.
In just the brief time you spend looking, you can see an empty glass Coca-Cola bottle, a caterpillar hairclip, a Wonder Woman action figure, a Madonna cassette, a pair of pearl costume earrings, a sleeve of pressed purple and yellow flowers, a broken china plate with bunnies painted around the border, a Miami Vice VHS cover, a small poster of Ralph Macchio, an unopened box of menstrual pads, a postcard of Hawaii, a small book of fabric samples, a star-shaped piece of confetti, a tube of shimmery pink lipgloss, an empty red Tupperware, a daisy made from pipe cleaners, a tissue stained rust-brown (you can’t tell if it’s real blood, but it looks like it could be), a crumpled yellow post-it note, a pink rubber duck, a pencil with a bitten eraser, a small figurine of a woman in a long cloak, a receipt from 1984 for six boxes of Eggo waffles and a bottle of Aspirin, a sewing needle on a long piece of black thread, a mousetrap, a stack of teen magazines, a pair of heart-shaped sunglasses, a warped and waterstained Congrats, Grad! card that has obviously been left out in the rain, a large yellow scrunchie, and a bottle of superglue. And all of that is only scratching the surface.
All Friends Welcome, 1993
Steel, found wood, radio components, rope, found objects
Artist asked the muse’s family and friends to save and send him any
everyday object that unexpectedly sparked a thought of her.
You crawl back out of the fort and the static begins to recede from your ears. The next doorway is covered by the same kind of thick black curtain that covered the entrance to the whole gallery. You step through into a much more well-lit room, which leaves you blinking fiercely as your eyes adjust. You let the curtain fall shut behind you, and the last of the static fades away.
This room is different, you can see that immediately. The walls are absolutely lined with paintings and drawings, each depicting the same brown-haired girl. There are pieces done in acrylic paint, watercolor, oil paint, graphite, colored pencil, charcoal, chalk pastel, oil pastel, and ink. The smallest is the size of your thumb, the largest almost six feet tall. Each piece has a small label next to it, giving it a number and describing the material. You walk slowly around the perimeter of the room, taking in each one slowly.
Each drawing of her contains movement and life. She’s almost always mid-motion: reaching for something, looking over her shoulder, spinning in a dress, leaning forward, and so on. Even in the ones where she’s perfectly still, her face is alive and bright. Sometimes she’s caught mid-laugh, sometimes she’s staring intently with her round, intelligent brown eyes. The most common way she appears is approximately fourteen or fifteen, with long brown hair and tidy bangs, dressed mostly in flannels and trousers with the occasional dress. There’s also images of her much younger, but none significantly older. Sometimes her hair is short and curled around her ears, sometimes buzzed right to the scalp, sometimes brushing her waist, sometimes slicked back in a neat bun.
In the piece titled Eight, she is wrapping a woman with brown skin and voluminous dark hair in a tight hug. Both girls have tears in their eyes, and while the unidentified woman doesn’t smile as brightly as Jane does, her lips betray her affection nonetheless.
In Seventeen, she’s painted from behind, arm-in-arm with a red-haired girl. In Twenty-five, she’s asleep on the sofa with her head resting on an older boy’s shoulder, sharing a blanket with him and another boy about her age. In Four, she’s dancing with a black-haired boy in a school gymnasium, their faces inches apart. In Thirteen, she’s mid-conversation with four boys and the red-haired girl, some kind of tabletop game spread out before them. In Thirty-three, she’s ducking her head and grinning as a tall man with a beard ruffles her hair. In Twenty-eight, she has her tongue between her teeth as she paints an older woman’s nails. A few other people make appearances, but mostly it’s just her.
The six-foot tall painting, instead of a number, is titled Jane. It’s a sunlit piece, golden and light and radiant. Jane is standing in a vast green field dotted with purple and yellow flowers, and her smile is the brightest it’s ever been. The sky is a cheerful blue, and the field is lined with trees on one side. She’s dressed in light, high-waisted jeans and a patterned purple top, a braided blue bracelet hangs from her wrist, and her brown hair is at its longest. She’s caught mid-motion, her arms spread in front of her like she’s ready to sweep the whole field up in an embrace, to hold and savor every part of it.
Jane, 1992
Oil on canvas
I miss you.
When you have finally spent long enough in this brightly lit room, taking in every angle of this girl and the people who love her, you make your way toward the exit.
There’s one final artwork, just beside the door. It’s a simple ceramic bowl, glazed in a friendly yellow, with the words take one carved into the rim. It contains a stock of purple bracelets, made of neatly braided leather cord.
Keepsake, 1993
Ceramic, leather
We still think of you.
You take one from the top of the pile and slip it easily onto your wrist, then step out of the building and onto the sunlit campus.
It’s not like you ever had a chance to know this girl, but now you know that she was there. That isn’t something you can unknow, not ever. Your world has expanded, just enough, to include Jane in your understanding of it. And it was nice to meet her, even if only through an artist’s preservation of her memory. You’re willing to carry a piece of her with you now, if something as small as wearing a bracelet is all that’s being asked of you.