Burial of Rose

(2017)

This piece looks to create a representation of the negative aspects of self, and have a full introspective look at that alternative self before making an attempt to “kill” that embodiment. Effectively this allowed me to sit with and mourn this former self through the construct of a funeral before moving on to a new personal growth. 

Burial of Rose took form out of the creation of a preliminary piece called “Rose ‘02”, where there was an exploration of obsession through memories of my sister’s love of NSYNC singer Justin Timberlake. This resulted in a stereotypical shadow box collage of the singer covered in kiss marks and sprawled writing of wants and needs that my sister would make in her early teens. After the creation of the box there became a realization that the obsessive character of “Rose” was more an extension of the obsessive toxic self than anything else. This resulted in an hour long performance where, after destroying and rebuilding the previous objects into a funeral shrine, I sat in a funeral garb and a handful of roses with said shrine. This allowed me to think on the toxic aspects of myself, such as my obsessive and angered nature, before accepting it and locking it in the past having a symbolic “burial”. The locker would then sit for weeks before being finally disassembled and mostly destroyed. 

Recordings and artifacts from the performance have been saved and redisplayed on two occasions: in the group exhibition IMP(s) (2017) and the solo exhibition The Getaway City (2019). The display includes the ink wash drawing of the intertwined Rose portraits, a dying bouquet of roses, and a broken screen display documentation