Every piece in this show was shaped from objects, film, or audio found in my mother’s belongings. Objects were embedded in the exact condition in which they were found. Film footage was merely edited and, in some cases, slowed down. Audio is delivered verbatim.

But someone does, I might now desperately yell to the heavens.

    Down into her soul, my mother was a historian. She believed in history; she believed that everything was history. When I was young, she advised me to collect. She said, “It doesn’t matter what you collect, just collecting it will make it important, valuable, significant.” Time would make it into history, and history was what mattered. I never did take her advice, but she did. She collected and collected and collected and collected, and she didn’t “pack”.

    Her life told in photo-ids, her ideas scribbled on envelopes / matchbooks / napkins / parking tickets, a mountain of keys, assorted dead flower arrangements, letters I’d written to my friends, her home-made movies, her hole-ridden shoes, her videos, her moth-eaten rugs, her silver tea set from a Russian refugee fleeing the Bolshevik revolution, the tapes from her answering machine, her rubber bands, her paintings, her rain-molded book of valuable Japanese prints, her rusty paint buckets, her mouse-riddled furniture, her cartoons / sketches / doodles, her brass scrivener’s pen from the Ottoman Empire, her painted stone fireplace, every wall calendar she’d ever owned, the broken setting and loose diamonds from her wedding ring, her spray-painted Christmas cards from before I was born, clothes from her pregnancies, clothes she wore before she graduated from high school, her father’s letters home to his high school sweetheart while flying as a pilot for the French Air Corps in WW I, the seven novels she wrote but never published, the three books of poetry, checkbooks from her closed bank accounts, a teddy bear named Edward that stood eight feet tall and leaked tiny balls of styro-foam wherever he went, two screenplays, a rock from every place she’d ever been in the world, and more, much, much, more...

    Her things are the first collection I’ve ever owned. And, in the end, I must say that she was right. These things are important, valuable, significant. They are history – though perhaps not the history she might have once imagined. Together they’ve become home movies of my own personal Big Bang & the raucous aftermath that coalesced into my small universe. She, who believed, stood at the edge of that moment which was my story of origin, i.e. life lived in her gravitational field – filmed it, recorded it, scribbled down her observations, looked but never examined (not enough time!), left it to “the historian” to decide what, of all of it, mattered and why.

    My own field equations is a reflection out from and back into this small universe. It is, perhaps, a portrait of a mother who was my sun for a while. Perhaps it is a portrait of me, illuminated by her light, making me visible for a time in all this dark matter. Who of us could ever stand far enough away from the literal star dust of which we are made and truly know what that stardust is and, thus, what we are.

    Like Einstein’s original Field Equations “...which describe the curvature of space-time produced by a gravitational field...” and which, to this day, continue to generate solutions that allow physicists to describe “the actual shapes of space-time” –  defined as “...the arenas in which all physical events take place,” I hope this meditation (in three concurrent parts: field songs (imbedded audio), field sightings (visual out-takes), field evidence (influenced objects)) will recreate for you the arenas of our world and some of the ordinary, extraordinary events that took place within them.