Some Things Just Hurt

Some Things Just Hurt

“Some Things Just Hurt” is a site-specific installation I created for Bosque Gallery at Lone Star College - Cy-Fair. It will be on view at LSC-CF through April 18, 2021. In June, 2021, it will be installed at the TANK Space project gallery at Spring Street Studios in Houston’s First Ward Arts District.

For this installation, I envisioned an open, collective memorial to loss. I had the idea about a year before the COVID pandemic arrived, thinking mainly of tragedies such as road accidents and school shootings that inspire survivors to enact two of our most basic human impluses, to mourn and to create. Since the pandemic, that feeling of loss has been multiplied hundreds of thousands of times over.

I built “Some Things Just Hurt”from stuffed animals, balloons, graffiti and other elements that survivors often use to express love, pain, grief and other feelings. I scoured thrift stores and other sites, collecting many object that carried their own histories in the form of well-worn surfaces, torn fabric, scents and other markers.

I see these disparate found objects as coming together for an ephemeral representation of sympathy and solidarity before I donate them back to the thrift stores, returning them back into the urban recycling stream, like seeds from a spring dandelion. Hopefully they will live new lives and continue to build their histories.

I am grateful to LSC-CF for providing me with the artistic freedom to create this installation in their beautiful light-filled gallery.