Memory

Last night I saw a documentary about Los Diaparacidos - the Argentinian generation who the government "disappeared" in 1977-1978. More than 30,000 people died, have never been found. Thrown out of planes, shot at close range, tortured. Erased. It was a difficult film to sit through, but I am glad I went.

A few minutes before the film began, I got a call from my mother telling me that another of our relatives, Elizabeth, had just died. This news came a week after she told me her cousin Dallas died of stomach cancer.

It was interesting timing - the news of this new death, and the film I was about to see.
I was thankful the lights in the theatre began to lower so I wouldn't have to talk about anything at that moment.

There has always been a lot of death in my life.
I began thinking about how I could express my experiences with it in my work.
I have had this thought for years now, and never knew how to begin.
What medium?
What images?
Why would I want to unravel the past?
And again "What is the stain of memory?"

During the film, my thoughts went to the Argentinian artist who painted the portraits of the disaparacidos with water on a cement sidewalk on a hot day. As soon as the portrait had been painted, the sun had evaporated the water. Countless faces were painted, and erased.

Erasure.
Memory
Carrying on
Enduring
Forgetting
Remembrance.

I thought about how the passage of sun over paper weathers it; how "archival" is so important in most aspects of fine art.
But what if the traces of sunlight over a page does exactly what it is intended to do - to fade, to stain, to remove...?
I thought about tracing light over a surface of a painting since last summer, but now it's evolved into more of a concise desire.

My cousin Dennis died in the World Trade Center.
Lisa Steinberg died when I was 11.
AIDS started to kill people in Chelsea and the Village when I was 7. No one knew what it was, or what was happening.
The first AIDS quilt was only one piece in Central Park on the Great Lawn. I walked around the whole thing with my mother and remember how quiet the park felt that day.
Today there are thousands of quilts of equal size all around the world. It could never be in one piece in one place again.

Etan has still never been found.
Nixmary Brown died a few years ago.
Schlomeit.
Wil Sudo
Maribel Garcia
Roxanna Rose Mennella.
died of unnatural causes, or by their own hand. The frequency of deaths in my life increased in high school - the class before mine was cursed: 5 deaths in 4 years. Fiona Pechukas and I rode the train together often after school. I skipped the turnstile when I went to her funeral in Brooklyn.
Uncle John
Uncle Richard
Grandpa Joe
Aunt Marie
Uncle Frank
My father's father Athanasious died when I was 13.
Many people died on Sept. 11. I saw their faces on "missing person" posters on chain link fences all over the city.
100,000 people just died or are waiting to die in Haiti.

New Orleans.
Iraq
Iran

I found a way to begin to communicate all I have to say about this - about death.
Not just how death has affected my life, but how to begin to expand it outward - to include my story in a more universal story.

A friend just pointed out that the painting at the top of this post was my angle of the twin towers when they fell.
She was right, and when I heard that I almost started to cry because I did not realize that before today. But it is true.