R.I.P. Tees: A Meditation on the Archive of Mourning
Friday, August 4, 2017, and Saturday, August 5, 2017, at Outlooks: Heather Hart, Storm King Art Center
“This work shows up in my practice as a series of questions: what constitutes a memorial, a public monument, and who, specifically, are the people and events that matter enough to be publicly memorialized?”
Lachell Workman presents a process-driven performance entitled “R.I.P. Tees: A Meditation on the Archive of Mourning”. This explorative performance considers the geographies of public and private monuments as they relate to inner-city spaces marked by memorialization and Storm King’s new addition of Outlooks: Heather Hart. R.I.P. Tees extends from Workman’s textile-based, t-shirt works embarked upon during her 2016 residency at the Shandaken Project. Within Workman’s practice, she considers the multiplicity of the memorial t-shirt as a cartographic corporeal marker. Workman points to the radical, performative possibilities of bridging literature, verbal testimony, installation, and oratorical history.
“Through a material investigation of ephemera and infrastructural materials, I am exploring what it means to visualize and construct a memorial within visible and hidden spaces. Many of these sites I describe as “empty,” “invisible” and “hidden in plain sight.” Sculpture and installation have served as my foundation for instigating complex narratives of monuments as they exist within public and private spaces. I am particularly interested in the formal and aesthetic language of the street-side memorial and the cultural coding of the “R.I.P. T-shirt. ”This work shows up in my practice as a series of questions: what constitutes a memorial, a public monument, and who, specifically, are the people and events that matter enough to be publicly memorialized?”