cigarette butts, bronze wire, crate
2018
37" x 24" x 13"
The title is taken from a passage in In the Wake: On Blackness and Being by Christina Sharpe. Here, every discarded butt is charged with the desire to experience relief. A break. A pause to collect oneself. The ritual in routine. The moment in transit. In some instances, a currency. The thought we put away with the last drag as we move on with our day, with our lives. Each discarded butt represents one person's life, brought together as the community like petals of a flower. Does the act of rescuing these filthy butts, charged with all of the hopes and/or despair transform them into something life affirming like a bed of flowers? Or memorializes like a tombstone with flowers laid at its head?
Cigarette butt paper, archival glue
2019
14 x 18
Cermamic, wood, 100 azabache charms, brass ringlets
2015
4.5ft x 2ft x 3.5 ft
168 flesh tint dyed mouse trap, rhinestones, gold chains, copper wire, plywood
2014
28" x 30" x 30”
Güiro, afropick, found frame
2013
10 x 10
Flower, cigar box, collage
2013
11 x 15 (framed)
Mega millions lotto tickets, tobacco, glue rolled into 734 cigarettes
2015
In this weeklong performance, I established a workstation inside Rush Art Gallery during business hours and rolled cigarettes on lottery tickets in an effort to fulfill a self-imposed quota of rolling 1,000 cigarettes in four days. I rolled 734 cigarettes and documented the performance by playing that number combination in the lottery that day. The “lotto cigarettes” are an iteration of my interests in the dichotomy of false hope and despair. The performance merges the momentary hope associated with possibly possessing a winning ticket and the sense of relief smokers get when they smoke a cigarette. The cigarettes are displayed in tally formation, to account for all of the failed attempts to wish one’s way out of our conditions. The labored rolling of cigarettes references my family lineage in toiling the tobacco fields of Puerto Rico going back a century.