This Is What Was Waiting
"What Was Waiting" transforms the written poem into a three-dimensional stage, where words and objects become actors in a metaphorical performance.
The poem is the installation.
Everyday objects stand in for straightforward language, with alterations to convey emotion. A bag of items sits next to a chair, but it is a chair without a seat, performing displacement and unease. Inside the bag are items important to the artist: poetry books, a musical instrument, and other items noted in the handwritten poem taped to the chair. Beneath it, words have fallen to the floor.
Hot and cool colors anchor the visual field. The red shoes are a nod to Dorothy's way home, a fitting echo given the installation's setting near the Sunset fires at the edge of Hollywood.
The installation explores how spatial relationships can amplify poetic meaning. Positioning, material, void and presence all become part of the poem's vocabulary. Viewers encounter artifacts and experience the poem simultaneously as literature and sculpture, as concept and sensation.
The handwritten note creates intimacy. The fallen paper scraps suggest fragmentation and loss. Words that once held together in verse now exist in isolation, their meanings shifting as they occupy new positions relative to the seatless chair and to each other. The viewer pieces together the poem through spatial discovery, only experiencing a literal reading when close enough to see the handwritten poem.
What results is a tension between poetry and visual art, where meaning emerges from the shifting relationship between text, object, space, and witness.
Re-Envisioning Resilience: Reflections on the LA Wildfires continues to August 2, 2025 at Barnsdall Junior Arts Center Gallery, 4814 Hollywood Boulevard, Los Angeles
What was waiting at the front door
Bags stuffed with papers, passports, tax returns,
medications, laptops, ipads, chargers tangled up.
That jacket I only wore once, I swear, I'll wear it
again, some night when hell isn't hovering
blocks away, just north of here in what will be
known as the Sunset fire.
North, in both directions, panic-painted
nightmares hang in every room.
No one is sleeping, every hour checking screens,
making calls, scanning from rooftops,
beneath bone-shattered skies with each other,
and these few bags at the door, waiting.