"Nothing, basically" 2023

graphite on paper. writing.

excerpt from accompanying text:  

"My summer was nothing, basically. I woke continuously into tired warm mornings, plagued by a persistent haze that a newsperson explained was from wildfires in Canada. It slowed the daylight to a crawl, and watered down our shadows like weak tea. The drawings I managed to make were stubbornly gray — thoughtless dishware still lives of the kitchen table. I’d rarely see my roommates, who either left absurdly early or slept well past when I went to work, so I really only lived among their objects; the traces of lives lived close to, but not in contact with, my own. These objects seemed puppetted by the absent humans working invisibly upon them, causing the kettle to brew tea, the forks to gather in dirty water beneath the faucet. Fruit would appear in woven plastic sacks on the window sill, then be transformed the next day into skinny crescents on the countertop, or else rot in place with tiny dances of flies gathered over blooms of mold. 

The drawings never finished, but they didn't need to. They stayed as fragments of the day: long deep breaths I would take before getting into my car, sitting in traffic, descending the narrow stairs to the basement of my work..."