Artists Registry

No one now lives who went to sleep on September 10th, 2001. For some, their journey ended in a way far darker than they could imagine one sunny September morning. As for those who awoke on September 12th, their experience as victims will span a lifetime as they come to terms with living as unfamiliar, quintessentially altered people in a world which is completely foreign to the one they once inhabited.

Gibson knew something essential about the human experience when he first conceived of Agrippa: A Book of the Dead, namely, that memory has never been directly conveyed from one individual to another. Those who study tragedy after its occurence are witness not to the act, but instead become witnesses to the witness, a copy of a copy, a lie, just smoke and mirrors. Perhaps this work, abessemori, is no more than that: an excellent forgery, but as imperfect as it is, this collection of artifacts spanning 3 decades of human tragedy, connected in insane, impossible, conspiracy-theory-ranting-crazy ways that I could never have forseen when I began (and I confess this) is a vessel for the tragic experience.

This is about you and me. This is about saying I love you, constantly. This is about my cousin who did not cheat death 3 times and the woman who lived upstairs. This is about small worlds and the vast distances between one night and the following morning. This is about nothing.

Abessemori is a traveling collection of artifacts passed from one keeper to the next under a strict set of rules: (1) Within 90 days of receiving Abessemori, it must be passed to another who has agreed to the same rules or else burnt in its entirety. Matches are included. (2) Abessemori is read with pen in hand and to be corrected, modified at will. -- There is one Abessemori now and in time there may be more.