Say My Name

Just finished an installation piece, called SAY MY NAME. Really incredible in so many ways.

I guess I've found my niche in that I really really love creating installation pieces. The process is both a response to a personal environmental issue and a dialogue with a viewer during the exposure to the piece and after the fact as well with me and in the internal world of the viewer. This one resulted in an uncomfortable feeling for many as it raised issues we'd all rather not talk about any more which can lay the foundation for more of the same.

The inception of this piece began to some degree during my daughter's miscarriage experience. There we were, my daughter, son-in-law and myself, in the hospital trying to assimilate and deal with a very very trying experience and not lose it. I had to remember everything. Through the whole thing we all felt that there was a no name issue. No one would say baby, or embryo or fetus or child or her or him not even it hardly. There was this amorphous, unmouthed word almost a preconcept that could form no word or thought. Even after the baby was extracted and put in a steel dish a nurse whisked it away from me as I approached to look so it can be removed to nonexistence, a tissue, a specimen to be disposed and unheard of. It was then I knew that I would come back and address this in my art.

A few weeks later I was hosting a local cable television show called ASK YOUR DOCTOR which can be viewed at askyourdoctor.tv. After we signed off the air the doctor/friend I had interviewed asked me if I noticed anything interesting about the anatomy book he had used for demonstrative purposes during the show and I shrugged and noted that the drawings were pretty good. He nodded and told me it was a banned book and was written by a known and avowed Nazi and that it had been in circulation in the States even in the 90's. I was taken back a bit and weeks later felt a bit haunted by that book and him. Here was the son of a Methodist minister, very involved with his church and with christian matters carting this book of dissected Holocaust victims and using them to explain things to unsuspecting people.

It was here that I saw some similarities in that these victims who once had names, families, lives, favorite shoes had been reduced to an image with no name no hint of the being that once inhabited that body. The breeding ground for what is probably only the first in a series of pieces dealing with SAY MY NAME had been formed.