This piece, beast of burden, is an opportunity for me to render issues I usually deal with in my work like perception, empathy, frontality, and instability while being both intimately entangled with the conceptual content and willfully removed from the final product.
The work consists of two mirrors, an image of a text composed, hand lettered and framed by my grandfather before my birth, and a pile of rocks collaboratively gathered with friends and stacked in the window by them.
I have known this text all my life and as far as I can remember it never made any less sense to me than it does today. It has always tickled my humor but felt true to the core. Strange, humorous, honorable words to live by.
I love rocks. They are amazing acknowledgements of time and scale.
I suspect we are nothing to them.
The gathering of rocks with friends and their two boys is a way to spend quiet time, share taste, and connect. Allowing the boys to have the final say in the composition of the rocks is a subtle nod to a family tradition and my way to impart agency.
In my work and life I often wonder about the potency of ideas, how they survive and change and what they truly become as they are born anew in each mind that they sprout.
These words will slip away long before these rocks are sand.