Eulogy for the Rising Sun, 2024.
Installation view of Collapse All Windows and Exit, 2024. co-organized exhibition with Matthew McGaughey, Irina Skornyakova, Molly Tierney (artists work also pictured in installation shots). Photos by Kurt Nordling.
In early August, I woke up thinking about sunflowers.
In my neighborhood, they’re sold by the truckload in dirty buckets; cut, dying, decorative, dead. That’s their lifespan once they’re taken from the fields. Before this, they stand next to each other in rhythmic proportion under the star they study. Not quite harmoniously, but with synchronistic attention, they spend their days in observance of the sun. Orienting their circadian clocks with practiced sensitivity, they twist their necks to greet the East in anticipation of the morning until they are old enough to face East, always, or at least before they’re plucked by famine or for profit.
Anyway, on that early August morning, I woke up with the sun to walk my dog and there were sunflowers hanging in a long line in the wrought-iron holes of a wrap-around gate of the foreclosed bar under my building. After a humorous exchange about death and purpose with the lovely sanitation worker who started to take them to his bin, we decided I should carry the 56 flowers to my studio. I’ve been meticulously wrapping them, encasing them and connecting them to copper wire (the most conductive) ever since.
Eulogy for the Rising Sun
Exhibition text, 2024