The Remains of the Day

FThe Remains of the Day began with what was left. The wax figures from Which Side Are You On, Now? had been cast as caryatids and melted over the course of that exhibition. Gathered and fragmented, they were enclosed within a white picket fence around a central column where a single, partially burned figure stood. What had been a durational performance of endurance became an archaeological field of debris.

Percy Shelley's Ozymandias haunts this work, but with a shift: the collapse here belongs not to the powerful but to those who held the structures up. The column at the center marks where the figures once stood elevated, performing, supporting, holding things in place. The picket fence contains the aftermath, that most American of boundaries now enclosing not a lawn but a heap of burned-out bodies. The fragments on the floor are not a monument to authority. They are what remains when the labor of support finally gives out.

Wax figures, picket fencing, column. 2024.