We're all going to die (except for you).

In 2007 I thought it would be a really good idea to do a show about Death, the Sublime, War, Memory and Waiting…although not particularly in that order. A conversation started with the Henry Art Galleries’ Associate Curator Sara Krajewski, who then invited me to chooses things from the Henry’s permanent collection to make what became “We’re all going to die (except for you).” Here are some parts of that show:

 East Gallery installation shot with mourning dresses, drawings, owls barrowed from
the Burke Natural History Museum, and mourning ephemera barrowed from Sandra Kroupa

The second room I used for  'We're all going to die...'  was the west gallery. The south half of this room I used to create a waiting room for museum patrons to wait for their own death. There were  Kleenex, celebrity gossip magazines, & self help books for people to read. Or, they could sit and look at the 19^th century landscape paintings that I chose from the Henry’s permanent collection. The paintings, and one photo were hung across the way on the north side of the gallery:  Alexander H. Wyant, “A Gray Day”;  William T. Richards, “A View in the Adirondacks”;  Bruce Crane’s “Meadow Stream”;  Pierre E.T. Rousseau, “Golden Sunset” and Ana Mendieta’s  1978 photo “Untitled (from Silueta Works in Iowa)”.
On the floor are hundreds of cut-out etched paper solders and red carpet thread. I conceived of this half of the room as a military theater and the paintings would both act as backdrops but also reminders of the sublime. Solders were like bits of trash on the floor of the museum, silently committing paper carnage on the museum’s parquet.