WELL (2019)
video (4 hr, 3 min), Campbell's Soup can, metal bucket, water, silkscreen print
variable dimensions
Well is the unforeseen result of an artist residency in Slovakia, and of the eternal question of what to do with the 'local context. Learning about the efforts in Medzilaborce and Mikova, in Eastern Slovakia, to capitalize on the Warhol heritage, was not an instant inspiration. But digging deeper into the story – how everything even remotely connected decays and disappears –, it grew on me. Warhol was not born in Mikova. His parents' home there has long been demolished, only a well and a pear tree survived. The tree got truncated by power cables some 20 years ago. The tree had to be cut some 10 years ago. Only a trunk remains. And a well. As someone who spent years drawing trees mutilated by overhead power cables and whose last show featured tree trunks, I felt obliged to make a pilgrimage there. The result is a backhanded homage to what remains: a 4-hour film on the well house and the trunk in the setting Sun, a fitting clepsydra and two silk screen prints, reconstructing the still living tree from fragmented archive sources and, from a newspaper obituary, the death of Jozef K. on his way home from the Medzilaborce Warhol Museum.