blackout
It was always called Grave Poem before I knew why. I was blacking out everything because I had to get the need to draw out of my system; i needed to approach things more directly in terms of material and action. I had written a poem and started to black it out, continuing on to fill in each of the squares on the page, and continued on to the next page after that. As I realized the marker was starting to die, I started to fill in the squares in concentric circles, so that the process dictated the gradation. Occasionally I would lick the marker to get the ink to flow better, and it died as I was finishing the last square near the middle. I decided to display this flat on the ground, on a heavy base of concrete that started to remind me of a child's coffin, the size of one and now also the weight.
When I moved, a few months after the show closed, this sculpture was the last thing that I had forgotten to put in the moving truck, and there was absolutely no space for it in the solid tetris puzzle of the u-haul. So, the evening before I left, after dark, my brother, two friends and I each held a corner of the slab and walked it on a somber procession to an unmarked site where another friend met us with a shovel. Along the way we happened upon a single rose which was placed on top, a few words were spoken, and it was buried.