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 inside, a language of surfaces that gather attention, hold collective feeling, and give loss a visible address. Here, that address withholds the image the room already knows how to receive: a face, a country, a politics already translated for it.

Rust in the cloth comes from long contact with iron. The contact ends; the cloth keeps changing. Corrosion outlives its source.

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

The work does not choose between silence and declaration. It asks what kind of looking is being requested, who benefits when grief is made readable, and what remains when a public surface will not become proof. It gives back proximity as corrosion, interruption and the looking subject caught inside what they came to see.