GRIEF TO FILL A ROOM WITH
Second Iteration 2023, Contemporary Jewish Museum (first set of images)
2023
Vinyl, fiddle leaf fig plant, rug, folding chairs, dining table, armoire, hangers, clock, handwritten note, pants, drawing made by artist’s mother
First iteration 2021, Tiger Strikes Asteroid, Los Angeles, CA (second set of images)
painters plastic, fan, furniture
25’x14’x15’
Images from Contemporary Jewish Museum. Image credit Impart Photography and the artist. Inflatable constructed by Bill Kennedy.
Museum Label readd:
Grief to Fill a Room With
By filling a domestic space with an imposing inflatable structure, Grief to Fill a Room With gives physical form to the overpowering emotional sensation of grief, suggesting its all-consuming nature. The not-quite-invisible pressure of the inflatable has displaced or rendered useless everything in this living room, sparsely populated with traces of everyday life. Everything in the space is inaccessible and unequivocally altered by the quiet but constant force of the balloon’s presence.
Some of the objects in the room are drawn from Levine’s family. The hangers in the closet are from the childhood bedroom of the artist’s brother. The pink pants hanging in the armoire belonged to Levine’s maternal grandmother. The artwork on the window is a drawing made by the artist’s mother as a child in 1960. A note written by the artist in her studio rests on the table, reading: “’To get out of sorrow, is to get out of life—we don’t get out of our sorrow.’ —Ross Gay.” The presence of these family objects alludes to the notion that grief, along with other traumas and emotional experiences, can be passed from generation to generation, at times placing a burden or a weight of reckoning on those who inherit it.
Images from TSA LA, 2021
How do we quantify, name, visualize, capture, understand, the grief in and around us? This year (2021) we have been swimming in a sea of it. There are no words to contain or capture its depth. While on residency at Tiger Strikes Asteroid from November 2020 - January 2021, I completed the first iteration of this site-specific work as an attempt to illustrate the vastness and ever-expanding nature of this grief. We grieve for lives lost to COVID 19, we grieve for lives lost to gun violence, to police violence, to suicide, to environmental degradation… we grieve, we grieve, we grieve. - written in 2021 by Levine