Artist's Statement
The artist does not wish to make a statement at this time.
§
The artist wishes to take the head off a live rabbit. She wants to twist its little neck all the way around, slice it down the midline, take out the miniature organs one by one, and pop them in her mouth like the parts of a gummy hamburger candy. It’s important that the rabbit feels pain as it dies. The work is incomplete unless the soul screams as it leaves.
§
The artist looks right through the frosted glass of your bathroom window and watches you undress.
§
The artist washes dishes until the detergent strips her hands chapped and pink, until the carbonized pots shine like new. She washes dishes, fuming that she has to do all the goddamn work, that no one else can punish her as well as she can punish herself.
§
The artist will stick her hand in places that it doesn’t belong. Audience participation is highly encouraged.
§
The artist sticks on the basement tiles in a layer of cooling sweat. She is tired, but secretly, she crows in victory over the defeat of her body, over breaking its will to laze and rot. Summer sunlight streaming through the slit of the window high up the wall reveals a trickle of steam off her soles and naked chest and illuminates her clothes, scattered about like uncollected evidence at a crime scene. But there is no crime, only a body.
§
The artist burns at the stake.
§
The artist is a student of unfamiliar faces. On the train, she tries to hide her stare from the other riders, glancing up when she senses that someone has glanced down at their phone. She regrets that there’s so much to memorize because she knows that she won’t be able to carry her stolen hoard of jumbled features back to her papery lair.
§
The artist has one hand down her pants and a copy of Beyond Good and Evil in the other.
§
The artist is a jealous cretin and miserably shameless. She skulks through the haze of her days, imagining herself a monstrous saint, a saintly monster, made perfect in the image and fury of her creator. Scrutinizing the mirror, she claws at a red bump three millimeters in diameter. She emits loathing like a leaking septic tank. She would kill herself if she doesn’t think that she is the only thing worth living for. Every night, she wraps herself in the weighted blanket of the knowledge that the world will spin on when she dies.
§
The artist is forgetful and hates herself for forgetting until she forgets that she’s even forgotten.
§
The artist wants to learn but cannot stand being taught. She blames this personal failing on some nebulous trauma of her time-shrouded childhood, too slippery to pin down and vanquish. This oversight is intentional, because the artist also cannot stand the idea of changing, not even for the better.
§
The artist needs to call her grandma but doesn’t know what to say.
§
The artist works alone.