60 over 24

The movement from the wheelchair to the toilet depleted his strength entirely. He struggled to breathe normally and leaned forward, forearms on his knees, until he gained composure. “I don’t know if I can pull myself out of it this time.” he said. I can’t remember what I said. I hope it doesn’t matter.

Two weeks later, I laid on the couch several feet the temporarily placed bed in the living room. The light from above the kitchen stove scumbled over the contents of the two rooms. Every time he stirred I awoke fully - repeatedly.

The next day at 9:34AM I emailed his blood pressure to myself with my iPhone – I’m not certain why I did this but I found it days later among previously dismissed communications. “60 over 24”

Five hours later, tired from the night before, I closed the door and laid diagonally on my parents’ bed – atop the floral comforter. I like to think I faded to sleep with my father’s fade to death. It was quiet and for both of us, perception slipped away from that perceived.

His death nearly lacked the character of an 'event.' It was just one moment moving to the next - and moving so smoothly that it really could have been any other moment at all. And that is what has changed me most – the striking similarity between that moment and any other since.

Nathaniel woke me. He put his hand on my calf that jutted over the bed’s edge. He shook me slightly and I turned. “He just passed.” he said.

Later he said, “I’m sorry, I didn’t know what words to use.”

His words were perfect and I couldn’t imagine a better person to tell me them. Nathaniel was my older sister’s first child – the first grandchild. I was eleven or twelve years old when he was born and all my life I’ve associated him with youth and potential and life pulled to a new generation.

Years Earlier

Her hand raised and touched her face. Her fingertips contacted her cheek and paused there - her flesh gave to the slight pressure. It was not a gesture that supported an expression and it had no decipherable intent. Although it looked like a touch to affirm her own presence – her own solidity - her eyes showed no manner of recognition or relief – no affirmation, no contradiction.

The movement was prompted by the spark of a single synapse – the first that would have, years earlier, set off the series necessary to generate the movement that bore meaning – a slight rub in response to a near imperceptible irritant on her cheek just below her right eye. She would have, years earlier, moved gracefully to the next function afforded her by mobility – a push of her glasses up the bridge of her nose, a brush of a hair from her forehead or a settling to her lap and a touch that recognized the insignificant texture of her polyester pants. Instead her hand moved down and away from her face and stopped for a long moment just inside her peripheral vision, and then it vanished. image source

Stream of Consciousness

I am momentarily and strangely uncomfortable if I take a shower without first telling some one. It is usually a passing thought in a short-lived instant – just as I turn on the water I think, “I should have told some one.”

It typically passes along with the many other transitory mental moments that pop and disappear in the gray dribble between sub consciousness and functional thought. Yesterday it stayed with me though – and it begged contemplation.

I considered the fact that being alone, I am commonly and deeply imbedded in my thoughts when I shower. I wondered if, in some way, I feared just how deeply I could descend - perhaps passing over some ill-defined verge where the everyday would be irretrievable - where it would affect me corporeally and I would dissipate with the steam; “They would know I was in the shower when I disappeared – and that would explain everything. “ I thought.

When I inventoried my thoughts I realized that when I’m in the shower I am not moving intently from notion to notion or employing my time alone in serious contemplation - but rather, I move randomly. One inane thought prompted from the previous and so often just reiterations. The shampoo. The razor. The washcloth flung over the showerhead’s pipe. Perhaps I am afraid I could easily get lost in those thoughts – I would slide away into the familiar and blend into the even grid of the shower stall tiles.

I moved on and opened the bathroom door and chilled dry bedroom air swept in. And then I remembered.

My father was a plumber; I say ‘pipefitter’ to sound more impressive and so does he. Despite – or maybe because of - the complex array of valves and holding tanks, by-passes and heat-traps, he added to the plumbing in the home where I grew up, the system seemed to prioritize a flow of water in manners intent on supplying unpredictable discomfort to everyone involved. Taking a shower with house full of people moving about their day was a risky endeavor. The sudden shifts in pressure and flow seemed to have little connect to the abrupt change in temperature. You could be scalded by a dribble of water, then chilled by the same, assaulted with a blast of high pressure water only to be thrown through a moment of warm comfort to a blast of flesh-searing steam. That is, unless you told some one you were taking a shower.

We all knew what it was like so we respected each other’s shower time – though only to a limited extent. We had about 15 minutes before domestic activities involving water would recommence and set off the torturous shifts. If they happened sooner than that, you would hear my Dad yell, “Yeeeeooooww!” from the basement shower or my sister scream down from upstairs, “Could some one turn off the dishwasher!”

how good are your dwelling places (3 of 3)

Finding Maywood is part of an installation at Koffler Arts Centre’s off-site gallery and part of “how good are your dwelling places.” Finding Maywood resituates, wallpaper, carpeting and other materials placed in my Rochester residence by its former owner. The materials, salvaged

during our renovations, reappear here in a presentation that responds to the general architecture and the quirky cubbies of the domestic space adopted by the Koffler Arts Centre. These installations attempt to create a conduit between my tastes and theirs and now and then – a connection to what was lost inside of our gain.

Cyril Reade contributed to the placement of these mini-installations. Faeeza Masood helped with the preparation for this exhibition. Jen Burger made this entire installation what it is through patient assistance, tireless commitment and creative input – all in the context of an unheated building without running water. I am greatly appreciative of their contributions and everyone else’s involved.

how good are your dwelling places (2 of 3)

An Earlier Account is a video installation at Koffler Arts Centre’s off-site gallery and part of “how good are your dwelling places.” Other artists in the exhibition include filmmaker Rita Bakacs, Susan Lakin, and Ross Racine. An Earlier Account employs six projections in the kitchen of a former Toronto residence scheduled for demolition. Three pairs of projections situate over eight hundred drawings of a casserole dish, a pressure cooker and a slow cooker in two cabinets and a refrigerator. They represent the different cooking utensils kept in Jewish kitchens that separate those used for dairy from those used for meat. They are fictionalized traces of some one else’s everyday – evidence of an embedded ritual that affix objects and individuals.

Emma Vann helped out with the drawings that became the projections; her creativity and patience are greatly appreciated. And I certainly felt good going into this with Daniel Cosentino as technical back-up.

how good are your dwelling places (1 of 3)

Shelly's Appliance, in situ, found materials and video, 2009

I was brought up to believe a home was what you made of it.

Having been raised in the coal regions of the northeastern U.S., my exposure to varied religions and cultures was limited to attending Greek Orthodox Church services on certain occasions and eating Italian food in a Polish-owned restaurant. In 2005, my own family moved to a suburb of Rochester, NY that offered the most for our children’s education – a nationally ranked school district started by a largely Jewish community. It is now a somewhat diversified neighborhood although our immediate neighbors - all older Jewish - are pleasant reminders of its early development. Sylvia Weinthal sold us the house after building it and raising her family in it for forty-five years. Making the house our own meant taking it from its past. Within a day of possession we began to strip away its history - the record of a family and its routine intersections with objects and spaces. This has meant replacing elements of the home that were sanctified by the Weinthals’ constant presence and day-to-day tendencies with our own. I have never been entirely comfortable with that.

Sarah's Appliance, in situ, found materials, 2009

My art is both the transformed material evidence of my past and a surrogate for the missing. I draw on images, objects, and memories to form reliquaries of unconscious associations. All our experiences, performed imagined, past and future are inextricably linked to the objects and spaces that comprise our environment. For “how good are your dwelling places.” and exhibition organized through the Koffler Arts Centre and curated by Cyril Reade, I have focused my art production on my current domestic residence – what it had, what it has lost, what I want it to have, and how those relate to a collective understanding of domestic environments and cultural displacement, permanence, integration, and ignorance.

The works include fictional artifacts alongside real ones taken from my home, as well as hybrids of the fictional and the actual. All of the objects speak mostly to loss. The things in this installation pictured here attempt to recall an indistinct past that seeps into the malformed present. My inability to effectively call my past to the service of my present and my cultural ignorance surface through the camouflage of humor and dysfunction of seemingly functional objects and images.

The mezuzot temporarily affixed at the Koffler exhibition site came from the doorways inside the home where I currently reside. The Weinthals’ mezuzah remains on the frame of the front exterior door of my home.

The Hamlet

I drove my car – fast – through a pile of leaves this morning – I enjoyed watching them ride in the air current that curled around the rear of the car and then disappear.

Before - when I used to read things other people wrote that had nothing to do with what might become a resource for my students or a direction for my art - I used to read William Faulkner.

I have a terrible memory for novels and can barely recall the plot-lines of any of his stories although I believe I’ve read nearly every one. I don't think I was ever really taught how to read properly. I guess I’m content in knowing that I enjoyed them while I read them. I do remember several characters but only in the same way I remember high-school friends – in their general actions and apart from details that provide definition – except for Ike Snopes.

Ike is an idiot. He is an amoral being incapable of comprehending his own existence in the dark. Ike lacks connectivity to an agreed upon code of time and he is entirely without moral sensibility. Ike is responsible for two things – sweeping the porch and making his bed. Two things are important to him, a block of wood he constantly drags behind him with a string and a cow with which he is quite intimate.

Ike’s time is the immediate moment and, if anything else, merely comprehensions of the familiar. No memories, no recollections. “Yesterday was not, tomorrow is not, today is nearly a placid and virginal astonishment at the creeping ridge of dust and trash in front of the broom and the sheet coming smooth.” ("The Hamlet") He can see no further in the past than the block he drags behind him.

How wonderful it would be to be entirely unaware of what we should have done, to live only in the moment we inhabit, in a space that is amoral and amorphous – edges rounded naturally from a flow that is undetectable – spared from all consequence. How horrible it would be too.