Amie Souza Reilly

Salt (from the box essays)

artist statement:

This is a project about destruction and grief: these essays, affixed to boxes made of recycled materials and perforated with windows, are sculptures about the death of my father and climate collapse. To fully understand the content of each piece, the reader/viewer must push through the perforations, breaking the essay apart to reveal footnotes, small photos, tangents and citations. The destruction of the essay is the destruction of grief, both personal and global, and a destruction of language and art—art, artist, and audience joined and implicated in the physicality of loss.

editors’ note:

It’s tricky to render 3d work in a virtual space—to echo the experience of interacting with one of Souza Reilly’s box essays, the below text has very light font  on the pieces that would require manipulation-of-box to read in tangible print. This doesn’t replicate the reading experience of encountering one of Souza Reilly’s boxes in 3d form, but is meant as a gesture towards what’s lost in reproduction / in the virtual edition. 

∞

Yesterday I scrolled through an NPR photo essay about the evaporation of the Dead Sea and it made me miss my father. He moved out of our family home eight days before I turned sixteen. Nine years after that, he died. A double grief. 

The day he left was my sister’s thirteenth birthday, but that is her story to tell. 

In the essay is a picture of an abandoned barbeque grill between two overturned plastic chairs. The grill is no bigger than a shoebox and it has been crushed by the rock that is still wedged in the top. Many of the other photos are of the salt mounds left behind when the sea water disappears, delicate as piles of baby bonnets. 

I don’t remember exactly what she said on my answering machine, just that she said it was an emergency. 

When my father died, I climbed into my bathtub and turned on the shower. I had not yet erased my mother’s message from the machine. 

My students tell me that the readings I give them are too sad. I want to ask them What is “too?” 

I want to ask, What is the right amount of sad? 

Instead of dressing, my father poured the brine from inside a jar of green olives onto his salad. Now I do the same. Now I am nearing the age my father was when he died, forty-five. Now my child is almost sixteen. 

He was Portuguese, my father. The red-orange slice inside an olive is a pimento, a word which comes from the Portuguese pepper.

The Dead Sea isn’t a sea at all, but a lake, and its evaporation is caused by both climate change and water diversion. As the lake dries, the salt underground cannot turn into mounds, so instead it dissolves. All around the shoreline, the earth quits into sinkholes. 

Utah’s Great Salt Lake in Utah is also evaporating. The freshwater that empties into the lake is drying up because of climate change, what’s left is being used instead for farming and industry. If it isn’t stopped soon, entire species will be wiped out, the region will be covered in a massive dust cloud made of the arsenic, lead, and mercury currently trapped on the lakebed. The wind will carry death. “Already, a pelican colony on a Great Salt Lake island has floundered after their island became a peninsula, letting in coyotes.” -PBS. 

This morning I went to the beach in the earliest hours of the morning. The one where a pier stretches into the surf in the shape of a capital T. I ran down it as fast as I could, just to feel the aliveness of feet against splintered wood. At the very end, I watched a seagull throw an oyster against the decking, crack its shell, eat the meat. 

The seagull was huge. At first I had described him here as being “the size of a work boot,” a descriptor that aligns him to my father, to my father’s giant leather boots. I can’t decide anymore if this description fits, or if it matters, or if it is too much. I can’t decide, either, why I would want to compare my father to a bird that, after shattering a shell, tears out the softest part of a body.