This house is a site of transformation and pause. It is an immersive environment constructed within a space that has already undergone the ultimate conversion: a church detroyed by fire and resurrected as a hub for creation. While the building may no longer hold religious services, I find ritual here. Sacred objects. As a former Catholic, I find the air here heavy with the ghost of transformation, transubstantiation–the belief that the substance of an object can be fundamentally transformed while its outward accidents—the physical properties of foraged wood, metal, or glass—remain unchanged. This environment is a liturgy of the discarded, a commitment to the idea that a foraged relic found on the streets of Durham can maintain its humble characteristics while its internal essence is transformed into an icon through the relentless act of witness.
I am always guided by two questions: What does it mean to be human? and What can art do? In this room, the answer to both is considered through an affective atmosphere that registers in the body as a site of active change before the mind can name it with language. This pre-personal intensity lives in the immediate, visceral response to the way the heater moves the paper and the windchimes vibrate, signaling that the room is not an object graveyard but a living organism, in constant motion even when it radiates stillness. We are standing in an echo field, where time and geography are compressed into a single, shifting resonance. Derrida suggested that to grieve is to carry the other within us, an impossible task where we must host the dead in a way that respects their alterity while allowing their memory to perform a new work in our lives. These objects are not merely remnants; they are the physical markers of that mourning, performing a snapshot of mid-transformation.
The heavy accumulation of what we have lost eventually meets the creative drive to reorder our world, forming a collaboration between the weight of the past and the possibility of the present. This is a place for the transformation of grief as a rigorous, material process of breaking loss down into its components and reassembling them into something we can carry, a practice that finds its precedent in the bricolage of the spirit. It mirrors the chemical reality of oxidation: as metal ages and rusts, it does not vanish. It reaches out into the environment, its iron atoms bonding with oxygen to become a complex, heavier compound of itself-plus-the-world. We, too, become heavier as we age, accumulating the oxidative stress of memory and history until our original frames can no longer hold the richness of our experience.
Within this field of resonance, there are intentional markers of those who came before–remembrances of art ancestors like Félix González-Torres, Keith Haring, and David Wojnarowicz, whose work was a radical act of tenderness in the face of annihilation. The work pays homage to these three precisely because they understood that tenderness is not the absence of fire. In the work of Wojnarowicz, rage and tenderness were two ends of the same nervous system, a mechanism for transforming pain into power. This is the central engine of the work: the recognition that our collective rage and our collective tenderness are inseparable parts of a single transformative force. Rage is the tool we use to carve out a space where tenderness can survive the grinding machinery of empire and capitalism.
We exist in a dynamic state of joining and separating, a constant and invisible motion of particles. Falling apart is simply the primary requirement for ongoing participation in the rest of the universe. When an object disintegrates, its molecules are released from the obligation of being a specific thing and become raw material for the next thing. This site is a sanctuary for that letting go, allowing the material to shed its specific shape so it can participate in the vast, singing world. By stepping into this shelter, your body becomes another material in the field, blurring the boundaries between the person and the relic. We are all witnesses to this great redistribution, gathered here in this pause to listen to the world as it sings back to us from rust and ruin.
Jason Lord Art 