On The One-Week Anniversary Of My Lifetime Ban From The Town Library, I Present Seven New Artworks.
Speaking Volumes Part Deux. This installation boldly wrestles with the questions: What do seven shattered screens hot-glued to the roof of a rabbit hutch say to you? About you?
Anguish Clutches A Cancelled Library Card and a Cease and Desist Notice (Self Portrait.) Medium: Ink on paper. This work provides a conceptual connection to my previous, unauthorized, in-library exhibition, “This is What Happens When You Refuse to Add My Taxidermy for Toddlers Class to Your Library Events Schedule.”
In this new self-portrait, thought bubbles display Head Librarian Mrs O’Halloran’s surprisingly negative reactions to my previous installation (“How did that creep get into my office?” “There’s blood all over my Jane Austen lunchbox” and “Sweet Jesus, are those decapitated rodents supposed to be me?”)
Speaking Volumes Part 1. Medium: Paper mache constructed from titles in Aisle 17 (Hobbies — Knitting to Taxidermy,) of an unnamed library. A row of seventeen eyeless paper mache badgers signify the static, the unseeing, the artistic desert that is the soul of Head Librarian Mrs O’Halloran.
Stunted Blur (A Study). Medium: Library book-sorting trolley (3 wheels removed), 43 reading lamps, traces of red gravel. The spirit of this piece — the essence, if you will — is its halted mobility, illuminated for all to see — a glorious quest cruelly truncated.
Artist’s note: The red gravel signifies toil, grit, the struggle to acquire small, domesticated woodland mammals for taxidermic purposes, while also referencing my first failed attempt to install this construction in my chosen artistic arena, or — as Mrs O’Halloran calls it — her home driveway.
Speaking Volumes Part Deux. Medium: shattered library monitors, wooden “plinth.” This installation boldly wrestles with the questions: What do seven shattered screens hot-glued to the roof of a rabbit hutch say to you? About you? About Mrs O’Halloran?
In the piece known as Grappling Entities With Aggrieved Rabbit (Medium: colanders, croutons, leporid fleece), two figures constructed from perforated kitchen utensils and salad toppings battle for possession of a startled rabbit. Closer inspection reveals one lone tuft of white fur, shorn from the lower right flank of Bunty, Mrs O’Halloran’s second favourite Angora rabbit.
Speaking Volumes Part C. Medium: a Jane Austen lunchbox, 2 fire extinguishers, several dozen recently stolen hardbacks. Working on this assemblage I keenly felt the whispers of art, the murmurs of truth and the throb of my inner thigh where it caught on my penultimate traverse of the barbed wire fence surrounding the exhibitional plain, or — as Mrs O’Halloran insists on referring to it — her backyard.
I’m still toying with titles for the final piece. Unease? Or maybe Views From A Head Librarian’s Window On The First Dawn Of Her Stress Leave. Or perhaps Marmaduke, Your Favourite Long-Haired Rabbit, is Bald Now. Medium: Fur.
