Rebecca Lugo

On Friday 9/23, I had the opportunity to be a part of “Debriefing Grief” at Celestial Arts & Antiques. It was a wonderful night of poetry and art themed around the concept of loss, grieving, and, naturally, death. I and 25 other artists installed deeply connected works around both personal and abstracted encounters with grief. Below is the piece I presented, as well as the artist statement.

An unfinished piece from an unfinished body of work, Still Life portrays the absence felt by the artist regarding the loss of her father. This was the final test print; Still Life was never editioned due to the artist leaving school.

Still Life derives from an incomplete body of work titled “Son of Man,” which intended to build the artist’s late father from found objects. The collection of items would have served as a substitute for the mementos that have been lost to time. Still Life portrays thrifted shoes that stand-in for shoes that the artist’s late father may have worn. The detail in the shoes juxtapose with the empty setting; they lack context because they in reality lack true correlation with the artist’s late father. Still Life struggles within itself to stand as a legitimate artwork, just as the shoes struggle to convince the audience that they were worn by the artist’s late father. Mark-making and linework paint the shoes tenderly, but the shoes are small and lack a body to wear them. 

As an unfinished piece, Still Life remains as a reminder of the unfinished business we leave behind both when we die and when we exit chapters of life. “Son of Man” intended to include photography and drawings of the artist embodying the found objects alongside the objects themselves as artwork. Still Life serves both as an archive for the body of work “Son of Man” and for the artist’s late father, each having abrupt endings and missing pieces. However, the image as object survives not only as a reminder but also as its own artwork, just as a child survives a parent.

View More prints here.