As mortals, we are subject to a position between birth and death, regardless of the circumstances of our individual arrivals or departures from life. These paintings are a proposition for contemplating this human condition of mortality.

I worked on a contact tracing project for the Department of Public Health, from the Summer of 2020 to the Summer of 2021. I listened to hundreds of reports of death, and testimonials of illness, which left me acutely aware of COVID-19 fatalities in that moment. I began to recognize a similar feeling of precariousness that occurred a few years earlier, through reading the on-going homicide data that I’d discovered on the LA Times Homicide web page. I couldn’t help but begin to contemplate my own mortality as an intersection on a vimm diagram, where the homicidal deaths of citizens, mostly black and brown men, overlapped with the City’s COVID-19 fatalities. In that space, I questioned, when do the deaths of any human multitude present commonality in what we each feel?

In reading these figures as data on a screen, numbers do not carry the visceral quality conveyed by the shared physicality of a space, containing materiality. So, I was compelled to make a set of paintings that operated as a stronger announcement than the routinely digested data, listed on-screen. I wanted something more accurate to a feeling, something like a physical press release, delivered from a position in peril.

The mixture of soil and medium applied to these fifty-six canvases refers to the fifty-six events of homicide, which had occurred in March 2019 (as reported by the Los Angeles Times.) I attained approximate locations of the soil I’d collected through data found in these reports. With ratios proportioned to an average US American height (approximately 67 inches, by 41 inches), each of the 56 canvases on which the soil would be applied, were fashioned as golden rectangles.

Collectively, these placements are designed to be placed flat on a floor or the ground, dispersed in a space, where on-lookers, turned on-walkers may walk from one end to another, physically navigating their number, suspended within the inevitability of mortality.