BAC Commissions

The power’s out again. Yet here we are trying to think of age-old questions of public and private space, the role of institutions as beacons of culture, modes of address when surrounded by gentrification, by environmental disaster, by systemic racism, and paranoid police. We are drowning in darkness, and as everything decays in a state well beyond failure, we hold onto meaning wherever it makes itself available to us. Mainly we find it in working with others, though we have yet to come to terms with a whole new set of absurdities created by this very way of working.

From this candlelit pitch black space that is our hearts, that is our cavernous heads, our homes, we ask you, the luminary artist, to scribble something meaningful on a piece of paper, on your note app, on a napkin… You can do so blindly, either because it is dark where you are too, or because you have chosen to close your eyes for a moment. We request that you allow us to turn that scribble, that drawing, that word or sentence into a neon sign to hang over the entrance to the center, as a public artwork of nano-scale.

When it’s this hot and this tense, forming a huddle is not always necessarily desirable, we can’t always stand to be around one another, even if we know that huddles are the only way out of the profound darkness we are in. Perhaps when the weather cools down and we desire heat again, we might momentarily come together around this little glowing ember of yours to ponder what anything means anymore.