Jeff

Ceramic, wood, CS logo.
60″h 12″w 12″d
2017

My parents used to go bowling a lot when I was a kid. I was too young to stay at home alone, so they would usually bring me with them. I sorta hated bowling, and I’d usually end up playing the Mortal Kombat arcade game with a bunch of dudes three times my age. After a while I got really good at it. I would Kombat dude after dude and beat them all, usually playing for an hour or more on a single quarter. Ripping out spines, tearing off my face and setting them on fire. Fun game.

On Christmas night, when I was 11 years old, I had a really bad ear infection. Bad enough that my parents took me to the ER at St. John’s hospital, in Detroit (the same hospital where I was born). They gave me some antibiotics and some codeine, which took the pain right away. On the way home, I watched the Christmas lights streak through the air outside the car window, stoned for the first time in my life and feeling greaaaaaat.

When we got home my dad dropped my mom and I at the front door. We were taking off our coats and putting them away when we heard a ‘pop’ sound. I remember the look of surprise and worry on my mom’s face. She just said, “what was that.”

My dad came in quick through the front door and locked it behind him. “I was robbed and I think I was shot,” he said while looking around his body for a hole. He was wearing a blue down feather coat, and he found a perfectly clean hole in the sleeve of his left arm, with white feathers coming out from it. When he lifted up his arm we saw that by his elbow there was a much bigger hole, and blood was starting to saturate his sleeve, quickly changing the color of the fabric from blue to red-purple. When he took off his coat we saw the entry wound had cauterized itself on the way in, but the exit wound had blown out a large hole where blood was pouring from.

I ran for a towel while my mom called 911. We held pressure on his arm while we waited for an ambulance. He stayed right by the front door until they got there, I think because he didn’t want to get blood anywhere else in the house. The ambulance brought him to St. John’s hospital, where they stitched him up and sent him home. The police didn’t come until two hours later, which was normal for cops in Detroit.

After that, my dad bought a gun. A Glock 9mm. He got a concealed weapons permit and regularly practiced his quick draw. He’d pull the gun from his side holster and shoot three times up the center of the target from balls to brains. He called it “the zipper.” The targets were these life sized illustrations of hunched over men pointing a gun at you. He needed to feel some sense of control again. The robber/shooter had taken that away from him.

He started to bring me to the shooting range to teach me to shoot, putting the target the same distance as my bedroom window was from the driveway. So if something bad happened again, and he didn’t have his gun, the plan was that I would get the gun from his room and shoot the person from my bedroom window. 

But I could never hit the target. My hands felt too small to be able to hold the gun properly. It always felt like it was gonna fly out of my hands. My bedroom window suddenly felt like a sniper outpost, and I was completely terrified about ever having to try to save my dad, that I might accidentally shoot him myself in the process.

So, this bowling ball in this picture is too big, bigger than a regular bowling ball, and the finger holes are too close together to hold it comfortably; the logo I made to suite an early 80’s aesthetic barely fits between the holes. It would shatter into pieces if you used it as an actual bowling ball, because it’s made of ceramic, which is both a fragile material and a material that can linger on, even as fragments, for centuries. It’s as strong as it is weak.

It’s titled “Jeff,” and it was made in Guadalajara in 2017 when I went to the Ceramica Suro factory for an artist residency through the power station. I was offered their team of fabricators to produce some pieces, and I really wanted the work to somehow call out to the fact that it was made for me by other people with great talent, to let that meaning enter in to it. I like the idea of taking something so personal and letting it speak through something so simple and distanced from myself. If art can attempt to conjure the sublime but never truly achieve it, then this is me attempting to imbibe an object with a deeply woven and layered memory, with similar results… There is only one of them.