Non sequitur: Eat your gun, Sze artist Statement
I.
Before retired detective Lance White Man Runs Him inserted his service revolver into his mouth and pulled the trigger, he thought about what he might convey to those who wanted to know why. And he knew that the attempt to convey was essentially fraudulent, that the parade of horribles he had witnessed, been part of, or perpetrated were shadow reasons, appendages that might circulate through the gray nameless miasma he felt but that didn’t account for the thing itself. (Had he been a native English speaker, he would’ve known to say nameless gray miasma).
Babies:
There had been the baby who died of infection, malnutrition, and dehydration, left in a mechanical swing for something like a week, a diaper so soiled that maggots had begun to breed and hatch and burrow their way into the baby’s buttocks. He didn’t die from the maggots (e. Coli infection) but that detail sufficed for the jury to send the baby’s parents (yes, meth and childhood abuse for both) to jail for life. Which the good detective didn’t necessarily feel vindicated by, as it turned out.
There had been a baby who died of SIDS or something natural, he couldn’t remember - but whose mother - out of grief and drug-induced psychosis - put into a microwave to revive or reincarnate or whatever twisted thought might have infested her mind at the moment. It was hard to know what to charge her with, based on what the evidence showed - he couldn’t forget - but then a few days into it someone looked at the baby monitor and determined that a recorded file was recoverable and showed that the baby had stopped breathing in her crib before mom came to check on her in the morning. The mom took a leap off of Rapid City’s tallest building three days after being released.
There had been a baby who was left in a car that sat running outside a convenience store in Sturgis for three hours on a stifling August afternoon the week before the rally started. No one noticed until it was too late. That was a tragedy, not a murder - mom had gone into the bathroom, insulin in hand, but didn’t get herself in time, passed out, was taken to the hospital, and woke to ask the question that no doctor or nurse or anyone else, really, ever really knew the answer to.
Wrecks:
Lots of car wrecks. Sad, lonely, painful. Ugh.
Bullets:
Early on, a hunting accident maybe, or family. Then he saw or thought he saw lots of bullets.
And, though this remembrance of things past all passed over him in a matter of moments, he went from being emotionally crippled, to sort of halfway physically crippled, spiritually thwarted, etc, to just feeling plain old and tired.
He was readjusting his grip on the gun when he thought of a line about cops that always stuck with him: “the more maladjusted tend to be more satisfied with their work than the less maladjusted.” And it struck him that now that work was over, he was just that: one of the more maladjusted. Not sure what kind of mission, though.
Sarah Sze states:
Images in Debris is very much about the leftovers of an experiment, so, for example, you see a broken egg. But it’s kind of Darwinian: things die out, things stay around, things get added. For this show, I’m interested in the idea that, in some ways, images have replaced objects.