Empty Feast embodies works about marking time and understanding our place in time. To maintain our sustenance we have to use our ability to heal ourselves and our relationship to one another and to the world. Our world is continually changing, cultural and societal movements are in constant flux. During our time here we have to decide what side of that change we want to be on. We have to keep questioning our roll in society, the importance, validity, and responsibility. But first we have to pause, stand in silence and listen to what is inside.
2020 a year of reflection, a time to observe the silence & appreciate the pause to the constant hum of humanity. One word could sum up the moment, resources, the lack of, hoarding of, reshuffling of, the abandonment of, those with, and those without. Our arrogance of how we treat resources has truly broken us; the human race and the environment we live in. This moment in time has brought light to truths we already knew were there. The feast we have lived on is empty. The world we live in is in trouble and it is time we remember and reclaim our resourcefulness. Humanity has to take this moment to re-evaluate it’s relationship with the world.
With this year I turned further toward the found and discarded item in creating. Of all things phone books. I felt their weight, humility, and need to still exist. The pages quartered and redistributed, binding them into something new, hung in the summer sun like fish or tobacco to dry. I watched the papers wither and age. I thought about the names in those books forgotten and aging. Then about my mother born in Appalachia, a coal mining family, her people still generations later scratching out an existence. In a lot of ways time standing still. I thought about immigrants like my father, just looking for a little hope. I thought about those who were dying now with only a stranger by their side, many of them at an age that we have thrown them to the side, discarded. Resources, are we not all resources as well? Should we not stop and try and learn something from each other and these moments in time. The restructured books became a sort of alter to preserved obsolescence. From there I moved to using discarded books, twine, and finding solace in all things found or rediscovered.
This year has been disruptive for all arts, visual and performance. Like many artists I found myself having to regroup and reinvent. Both the size and presentation of Empty Feast; installation and adjoining work, was upended. The intended exhibition space was closed for the unforeseeable future. In reimagining the work it in turn began to mirror the experiences of the world at large. The process of reinterpreting the work opened up the opportunity to allow the installation to be in isolation as if in situ. Natural settings as well as structural spaces posed equal possibilities. The installation could change with each environment presenting less of a melancholic moment and more of a feeling of peacefulness. Until the world finds it’s self on the other side of separations and partitioning the work will move to each new ecosystem. The virtual presentations will continue to be presented until the installation in whole can be shared with a collective audience.