Love Lesson!

Reductive Relief, 19.5x25.5, 2023

Love Lesson! is a reductive relief print imagined to be set in an animist world of ambiguity. Two blobs, expansive like water with wings of a flight creature and the big gazing eyes of a biblically accurate angel, flank a small figure in the center, cradling delicate love in its arms. The blue creatures, I call whales, are all powerful. They are anxious. They are predators. They aren’t hungry. In this piece, two omnipotent beings seek to learn what love is, what that bright light feels like. 

Perhaps our place in the family of things is to see a soul in everything. This ethos of kindness and conscious love means to imagine that this love and tenderness exists for all things. It is the same tenderness by which we mourn Mars Rover Opportunity, whose final words—“my battery is low and it’s getting dark” — were announced alone in the expanse of the universe. We sang to it, to love it, to mourn the humanity we gave the machine:

I'll find you in the morning sun

And when the night is new

I'll be looking at the moon

But I'll be seeing you

Alone too was Mars Rover Curiosity as she sang herself ‘happy birthday’ one and only time; we programmed her to know of herself, of the celebration of her existence. They know more than we ever could.