Artists Registry

The morning of September 11 I was sitting on my desk, next to my bed. When I lay in bed I could see the towers but, that morning the blinds were down because I was working on the computer. I had been hearing the sirens going by, on the BQE (Brooklyn-Queens Expressway) but I thought it was a car accident (Not uncommon). At one point I picked up the phone to make a call and the lines were dead. That’s when I realized something was wrong. By the time I turned the TV and realized what was happening, the first tower had already fallen. When I looked out the window what I saw was the gigantic cloud of debris moving towards us, in Brooklyn. We were right on it’s path. I ran around our loft shutting down all the windows. When the could hit, I could not see the other side of the street. Two days later I hopped on my bicycle and rode around South Park Slope, Carroll Gardens, Cobble Hill and Brooklyn Heights. A layer of white dust and debris covered every surface. There were fragments of paper everywhere: checks, accounting records, fragments of magazines, envelopes, fragments of phone books, etc. I instinctually started picking them up and, stashing them in a bag. I didn’t know what I was going to do with them, but I figured maybe someday I would make something. The bag sat in the corner of my studio for 5 years until the exhibition Paradise According to Milton came along (Magnan Projects, NYC 2007). I felt this was a serious and respectful enough project to use that material for. The first thing I did was write down all the names that appeared in the fragments. I then checked them with the list of deceased from 9/11. I didn’t want these art pieces to bring any more pain to the survivors. None of the names in my papers appeared in that list. I then ironed them; which made the studio smell like 9/11. The papers were obviously impregnated with particles that were released by the steam of the iron. It was creepy, and painful to remember. I had already in mind that I would build the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil as a collage with the papers. Then I had the epiphany to have the negative become The Tree of Life. That’s how the two light boxes came to be.