Work in Progress: Writings on Unknown Certainty project

This is a writing revolving around a project I am developing and currently making elements for. No Unknown Certainties have been realized yet but pictures will be posted as they come to fruition.



Project Statement:
Unknown Certainty is a series of outdoor installations that use the form of roadside memorial to investigate non-specific markers of death. Within the installations, the objects comprising the memorials give no mention to specifics of the one memorialized. No name, photos, or references to gender, race, sexuality, and age are found. The sites for these memorials are not spectacular but rather mundane niches of roads, underpasses, wooded lands, and public parks. Although the form is instantly recognizable as a memorial and reminds of the inevitability of death, the namelessness and lack of objects reflecting personality creates the unknown. Who the memorial is for, why it is there, and how the namelessness of these memorials incites a fear of being forgotten all center on the unknown and the unremembered. Often constructed of banal and some ephemeral materials, these works touch further on the unremembered through the unspectacular and non prestigious quality of objects in the memorials and the impermanence of their erection. Within the context of contemporary ways of mourning and grieving, the spontaneous roadside memorial has come to prominence over the romantic graveyard. Through Unknown Certainty, the impromptu nature of roadside memorials is addressed and a concern for long-term upkeep and existence of these memorials is illustrated by visual evidence of decay and neglect as well as the temporal nature of the installations.