Look Back

Materials/process: black cloth, cotton stained through contact with iron, mirror fragments, thread; hand-sewn suspended installation
Dimensions: four suspended panels; three panels 9 ft, one panel 12 ft

 

Look Back takes up the ritual language of public mourning I grew up around: black cloth surfaces that gather attention, hold collective feeling and give grief a public place. The work keeps this form but withholds the image the room already knows how to receive: a face, a country, a politics already translated for it. 

The rust in the cloth comes from long contact with iron. Even after the iron is removed, the cloth continues to change. Corrosion outlives its source. 

Mirrors sewn into the black surface break the room and the viewer into pieces. They return the demand for a whole image to the viewer. 

Here, mourning is not offered as evidence.  There is no clean position of a neutral witness. Looking becomes another form of contact with a surface already changed by contact.