Pittsburgh Center for the Arts, March 31 – July 23, 2017

The long pull of a horizon lost. The hard edge where ground touches ground, where life expands and falls violently dormant. A horizontal, transparent gesture marks a space that holds a memory. The earth ripped apart. The black openings of the ovens - suffocating, drowning, dying; depressions like wounds.

Depressions like wounds.

One hundred and twenty nineteenth-century beehive coke ovens rest like graves in a South Western Pennsylvania rural valley in the small mining town of Ardara. They are buried inside of one hundred forty years of life that has swallowed them slowly over time.

Forbidden. Trespassed. Forgotten.

The ovens stretch beyond the highway, and curl along the acid orange sulfur creek. Diesel trains cut through, echoing day and night – their screams reverberating and shaking the hills surrounding them. Their whistles split the silence and crack the blackness of night wide open.

Crack the blackness open.

Time stretches and collapses. Memory falters. Memory fails. Memory falls away. Returns broken. Scale the debris, a ghost without face or voice. Presence. Walk through, pass in front, circle; stand on top.

Quiet. Blaring. Alone.

I crawled inside the darkest blackness and found a blinding light. It cradled my face and lifted it up – lifted it out.

Grace.