When Art Transforms
Completing the Past to Add New Meaning to Life
I hadn't planned on this project, it just fell on me from who knows where. And its beginnings were anything but altruistic. HOwver, in the end, something greater than myself spoke through me, and life just hasn't been the same since...
The video below was produced by a Canadian TV station out of Toronto, MediaTV.net. I am forever grateful to them for creating such a wonderful piece describing this project.
My friend Larry was a rough-n-tumble black man, with a penchant for partying, a criminal past because of it and openly gay. He was addicted to altered states and unsafe sex when I'd first met him. And he'd just begun the journey to recovery when Empty & Meaningless: the Box Project took root in my life. Larry was the first person outside of my immediate family to take on the task of the E&M process. He told me, and showed me, that it had changed him.
Although the aftermath of Larry's abuses lead to the conditions that ended his life early, during the decade I knew him he was, and he remains, for me The Mighty Oak of his box. I dearly miss him...
In Larry's words:
"The first side represents my relationships and promiscuous sex - and my realizing the reason I did that was fear, loneliness. I was insecure with myself. This lead to despair."
"So I jumped to the second dead-end road—alcoholism, which leads to nowhere except death and destruction."
"And as a result of that kind of lifestyle I felt like I was caught in between the highways of negative emotions and missed opportunities, especially after I found out I was HIV positive."
"Then I found the narrow road to recovery through 12-step programs, which helped me look at myself and change the way I feel about myself - take charge of my life again by accepting who I am."
E&M was invited into an 8th grade classroom at Lincoln high School by teacher Jeff Zerba with support from his wife Linda. The amazing creativity and insights expressed by these teens was profoundly moving. I built these stands from scrap metal (mostly rebar) and I named the resulting exhibit, "River Cacophony." The stands were arranged in a meandering way, their reediness lending the exhibition the feeling of willows along a creek.
This was the exhibit following the taping by the Toronto news station. It was during this exhibition that I met Mr. Mark Lysgaard who soon after became my partner in Working Artists LLC, an organization dedicated to empowering artists who, like us, were interested in using the arts for the betterment of humanity.
Two sides of a box created by an inmate at Coffee Creek Correctional.
This was a balsa wood mock-up of the proposed acrylic installation to exhibit the boxes of the participating inmates. Unfortunately at that time all extra programs were being cut from state programs to help balance Oregon's budget, so the sculpture was never created. Over the year and a half I facilitated workshops at Coffee Creek Correctional I worked with somewhere between 400 and 500 inmates. The women were not allowed to keep their boxes, so I exhibited them to help raise awareness about the rehabilitative programs, but more importantly to put a human face on the people struggling to create a new life while serving time.
