About

When a prize isn’t a prize

As recipient of the PAFA MFA “1 Year Out” award, I create this new work to be shown at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine arts in the summer of 2011.

After the financial crisis of 2008 and its aftermath, my parents continued to struggle along with most of the rest of regular Americans with fiscal uncertainty and all the anxieties that come with it. At some point, I clipped a photo from a newspaper that showed a house on a small hill, completely surrounded by water due to a flood. It stayed on the wall above my work desk for a long time, but I believe it led me to this piece.

I must have spent time on boats in a past life because I have long had a weird and unexplainable attraction to them. I envisioned a boat. a vessel built for two, outfitted with a small living space and things like a clock, a radio, and a telescope for keeping records of time at sea and looking out for dry land. This boat is constructed with the same types of materials that one would use to make a house, but clearly it is full of holes and would never be able to float. Its a metaphor for the constant state of anxiety that most regular people dwell in, beat back, try to ignore… Its a life boat that isn’t going to get your very far.

On the day that it had to be removed from the museum, friends helped me wheel the boat around the city as I pulled it by the tow rope in the front. There is documentation of this somewhere. It then got picked up by the owner of Bookspace, it fell apart on the way there, and was never seen again.