The Monument

Most monuments are built at the scale of states, wars, and public history: figures cast in bronze, plaques carved into stone, structures sized for the eye to fall back from. The Monument works at a different scale. The works in this series are about twenty inches tall, made from ordinary objects. They function as counter-monuments, pulling the capacity for memorial away from public narrative and giving it to the small accumulating gestures that constitute a private relationship.

The first work begins with a red tea tin I remember from a particular period in my life. After the tea was used up, the tin was repurposed as a Faraday cage: when something important needed to be discussed, phones went inside, wrapped in foil. The everyday object's function was suspended and became a small architecture of privacy. The work consists of eight custom-fabricated tea tins stacked into a fifty-centimeter form, smaller than the originals, no longer able to hold a phone. It points back to that memory while reaching toward a future in which the gesture of cutting the signal is no longer needed, a form that refuses to resolve itself. On the base sits a plaque inscribed with a line by Bei Dao: Debasement is the password of the base; nobility the epitaph of the noble.

The second work is built from diecast toy cars, the kind of toys a parent buys for a child over a span of years. My parents worked long hours; we did not see each other often. Some of the cars were not even handed to me directly. They arrived with distance built into them. These toys are kept, but are not toys anymore, and outlived their original purpose long ago.

Both works ask what a monument can be when its subject does not belong to public history. In one work, a signal blocked. In the other, a presence held in proxy by an object. This monument is small, not because its subject is small, but because the things it protects belong to a private register of care that does not need to be made public to be real.