Dad

Ice, custom built freezing unit made in collaboration with the artist’s father.

Variable size depending on ice accumulation.
variable dimensions
2017

“Dad” is a collaboration with my dad who’s worked as an HVAC technician for 35+ years. it’s a custom built condensing unit that freezes ambient moisture from the air to create ice formations. 

I worked with my dad on and off for a lot of years. About 20 years ago, in Detroit, we had a job at a house whose owner had recently died. We were told he was in his 80s, and that his wife had died ten years prior. 

The first thing we noticed about the house as we parked out front was that it had a hole in the roof about 8 feet wide. Inside, In the living room, you could look up through the second floor and the roof and see the clouds passing by. Under the hole on the floor was a blue kiddy pool that was in place to catch the rain from the hole. Since there was no heat in the house, it had become a large ice block sitting in the center of the room. 

The rest of the house was in shambles too, but the ice block stuck in my head. I kept thinking about the man who had lived there, hoarding soap and sitting in the living room with the block of ice. It weighed heavy on me that that man had lived his life into old age and had spent his last days alone in a house that seemed to mirror his own falling apart. 

I’ve written stories about him for years. There’s a fear in me that I’ll become him, which I think is why it won’t leave me. And the ice became this living thing to me. It felt like the hearth of the home, but it also felt like a dog. And it being so lifeless and slow, but still changing and forcefully central to the home, it felt like both the living and the dead. 

The fact that my dad and I created this together is really important to me and to the piece. It’s far less about anything clever or formal, and really just dealing with the feelings of that man, mixed with the story of my own life and my family’s. 

In the traditions of children following in the paths of their parents, this was a way for me to do that without actually doing it, and an attempt to find an action and an object that ran through all of those feelings and ideas.