This exhibition aimed to memorialize but also materialize the sense of space, time and physicality suggested by some texts my twenty year old son, Christian, a college student and aspiring poet, who chose to end his life in 2012. After walking a path for two miles along a railroad track beside the Cuyahoga River, he knelt by the track and waited for an oncoming freight train. The installation was designed to encourage movement by viewers in order to better grasp various aspects, such as text, while slowing down their perception and absorption of the grouped components. I chose a devastatingly beautiful poem that speaks of the exhiliration he imagined his death would grant him, along with other texts that show him at a low ebb as he struggled with constant pain from Bell’s Palsy. The installation had a number of discrete components grouped in close proximity including a low, U shaped 5.25” wide steel channel, 15” off the floor, painted an intense ultamarine blue with laser cut text on its sides, that ran the entire length of the 43 foot long gallery:

In that moment when my skin becomes one
With the graffitied train
I listen by rivers
That place where I belong
My eyes sail like driftwood
To become one with the color blue
And give up my body
To that sweetness which is neither pleasure nor pain
Which is nameless
Which is me
My skin the graffitied train
My shadow walking upon water
And I am nothing
But the color blue
Unaware of myself and dancing
In that naked sky nirvana

A door, based loosely on early 20th century mauseleum doors in the
extraordinary Lakeview cemetery near my Cleveland, Ohio home, was fabricated from transparent ultramarine blue and dark grey plexiglas.,The text 'screaming voicelessly to a distant silence' was inscribed onto its surface. A black patined, cast bronze door handle was also attached. The work’s mirror like surface reflected any viewer looking at it.

detail showing inscribed text and cast bronze handle

at left: An aerosol spray drawing by my son has been ovelaid on top of a Jim Carroll book cover. The drawing quotes the author, who was my son’s favorite writer: “I wanna be pure.”

'My Only Path', can be seen on the right.

The text reads

MY ONLY PATH
ONE OF PAIN
SWEET SUGARY DEPRESSING PAIN

My son was at a low ebb when he wrote this as he struggled with constant pain from Bell’s Palsy.

Quiet Gutter Birthday Curb , 2017
black patinated bronze, pigmented hydrocal, felt

Quiet Gutter Birthday Curb was the title my son gave to a xeroxed spiral bound collection of his poems. These words are laid out in a scrabble like arrangement of individual letters on a grey felt rug, each having been individually inscribed and cast into rounded, 3.5 inch wide, dark grey, hydrostone discs. A black patined, bronze cast of this book is laid out on the lower right corner of the rug. This cast may be seen as a marker for a life cut short.