Harboring Darrell – Three-Part Installation

My Creative Work, My Work, Uncategorized, Video Poem

It’s been awhile, friends.

I’ve been doing a lot of research and writing on death practices, the occult, and the act of possession (not like I wasn’t before, but even more so now). It’s made me realize that the art I’ve created in response to my grandfather’s death, initially coming from a place of fear and emptiness, has inspired a more loving relationship with death and the afterlife. To share the love of good death relationships, I wanted to post some pieces from Harboring Darrell, the three-part installation I made toward the end of grad school, in Danielle Vogel’s class, because it was the first time I created art that explicitly spoke of my grandfather’s death: allowing me to start the healing process.

The installation includes a funeral, an altar, and a collaborative offering in remembrance of my grandfather, Darrell. It is a companion piece to my project Helene, acting as a direct attempt to move beyond the self experiencing grief and focus purely on the process of grieving. Participants of Harboring Darrell are asked to mourn with me as they view a previously filmed funeral given for Darrell’s boots, interact with an altar created in replication of Darrell’s living room, and leave behind their own memories of loss as they fill out the “Harboring Darrell Questionnaire” and place it in the Box of Offerings.

The funeral:

Pictures of the altar and Box of Offerings.

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Thanks for reading. If you’re also interested in the topics of death, the occult, and possession, here are three books that I recommend:

From Here to Eternity: Traveling the World to Find the Good Death by Caitlin Doughty

Occult America: Secret History of How Mysticism Shaped Our Nation by Mitch Horowitz

The Mind Possessed: A Physiology of Possession, Mysticism, and Faith Healing by William Sargant

 

Bowietry

collage, Collage, found text, My Creative Work, Uncategorized

It's kind of how I feelTo skim milk foreigner

Try some Bowietry on for size: To skim milk foreigner, determinedly selling his wares and It’s kind of how I feel: a foreign body. I made these collage poems awhile back from images and text related to all things Bowie. The images are layered screen shots I took of Nicolas Roeg’s film The Man Who Fell to Earth. The text is from a few sources: Sean Boyle’s video essay The Sonic Landscapes of The Man Who Fell to EarthGraham Fuller’s essay The Man Who Fell to Earth: Loving the Alienand this awesome conspiracy theory essay by Peter-R. Koenig The Laughing Gnostic — David Bowie and the Occult

I hope you like ’em.

Note: I initially meant ‘whale’ and not ‘wale’ in To skim, but discovered that ‘wale’ means a plank running along the side of a wooden ship. It’s not the plank one jumps off of when caught and killed by pirates. It also can’t really make songs and rarely interacts with whales. Definitely not whale songs. But let’s pretend all these things. Also, laziness is a thing.

 

BAX 2015

Collage, Publications, Uncategorized

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Hello ALL!

The 2015 edition of Best American Experimental Writing just came out, so you can now see my collage poem, For Mercy, in their online issue! It’s alongside some other AMAZING pieces, like Matthew Burnside’s interactive novel, In Search Of: a Sandbox Novel and Blair Johnson’s (what I’m calling a) morphing, crumple poem, “You are only part of yourself, collected in tangles”. You can also buy the print issue, which includes work from Dodie Bellamy (I can say my work has been printed in the same journal as her?? SWOON), Cecilia Corrigan, Bhanu Kapil and Ronaldo Wilson. The journal was edited by Douglas Kearney, guest editor, and Seth Abramson and Jesse Damiani, series editors. I am most familiar with Kearney’s work (SWOON AGAIN), but they all have really awesome stuff.

Check it out, and thank you, BAX!