"The Harvest" is rooted in all those years when I was obsessed with the onslaught of ATM thefts in Baltimore. The thefts were wild, ranging from cross-city crimes to ballsy bang-and-bash events that involved driving an Econovan into a commercial business. One night, I was awoken by the sound of a van crashing into a CVS in West Baltimore. The damage echoed across the southern part of Sandtown-Winchester. I'll never forget the sound of brash disrespect colliding with glass and cement.
I started working on this collage at the end of July when my relationship went into a down spiral. It didn't end quickly, in part because my ex's preferred method of fighting was disappearing and not communicating until he was good and ready. He wasn't ready for several weeks, and that gave me time to make this collage.
I've come to understand that the collages are a byproduct of internal turmoil. I don't necessarily think that's a good thing, but you'd be surprised by the number of people who have said that it is. Personally, I think it will be nice to live without inner turmoil for a bit. I think it will be easier to make peace with the present if I recognize that the past, though wonderful at times, was unnecessarily bad, too. It's not just that it was bad. The crust of the bread will burn in the toaster from time to time. It doesn't mean the warm bread is ruined. After all, almost anything is salvageable once you put a little butter and jelly on it. I mean that it was unnecessarily bad. Communication is the bonding mortar of every relationship. Without it, the bricks start to crumble. The house falls apart. The next thing you know, that thing is up for auction with a starting bid of $5K and the expectation that the new owner will need to sink thousands of dollars into a variety of repairs. The decay from years of neglect was always unnecessary, but for some people, it's easier to let a small castle crumble than to sink time and money into the unknown future.
I guess.
Moving forward, I would need to know that some level of happiness, some achievable goal, was on the other end of a collage in order to invest time in it. These projects filled a negative space, sure, but for a long time, he was there at the end of that space, like a stray asteroid zipping through the dark sky. Now, the only thing to find beyond the gravitational pull of reality is a vast nothingness. I know it won't be that way forever, but that's the trick about forever. It isn't measured in time. Much like the white rabbit told Alice in Wonderland when she inquired about the confines of its boundaries, sometimes forever is "just one second," and that's long enough.