The genesis of this series was a poem by Marilyn Hacker from her collection entitled Love, Death, and the Changing of the Seasons. The untitled poem is as follows:

5:30 little one already light

outside. From Spanish Harlem, sun spills through

the seamless windows of my Gauloise blue

bedroom, where you’re sleeping with what freight

of dreams. Blue boat, blue boat, I’ll navigate

and pilot, this dawn-watch. There’s someone who

is dying, darling, and that’s always true

though skin on skin we would obliterate

the fact, and mouth on mouth alive have come

to something like the equilibrium

of a light skiff on not-quite-tidal waves.

And aren’t we, when on dry land

(with shaky sea legs) walking hand in hand

(often enough) reading the lines on graves?

I was interested in evoking the themes of balance, equilibrium, transience, ephemerality, memory, and the dualism of earthly life. These ideas are served best by the use of photographic imaging, already a form of memory and by mixed media, which requires a balance through the medium. The preciousness of the above concepts is furthered in the small scale of the work and it’s unfolding and subsequent enclosing in box form. These

are memories, private and personal but addressing the cosmic. They, the boxes, can be ‘packed up’ and filed away much the way one does with memories. Through the works intimate size the allusion is to an offering, a gift that can be held in one’s hand as a reminder or invocator. The boxes are also a form of a Momento Mori (an object serving as a reminder of death.) However, I can not think of death without thinking about it’s corollary, life. And this is the space in which the works float…