NORA SLADE
Night & Day
March 12 - June 23, 2019
Clockwise, viewed through the window:
Body option, 2019
Pizza box meditation option 1, 2018
Pizza box meditation option 2, 2019
Pizza box meditation option 3, 2018
Pizza box meditation option 4, 2019
Pizza box meditation option 5, 2019
Pizza box meditation option 6, 2018
Pizza box meditation option 7, 2015
Meditation Box Option, by Nora Slade
She walked out into the desert carrying her pizza box option.
The top of a cardboard box, folded for work. Folded for packing.
Cut into with a blade, each rectangle of the fold undone, painted.
The paint came in two colors, four rectangles painted the two colors.
The paint dried quickly, peach and pink. Peach and pink.
She folded the four halves back into each other. Back into the meditation option.
Severed from its box, the folded cardboard looked like the wind spinning in the four directions.
It had the width and general size of a pizza box.
She carried it out into the desert to weep into all four directions and at first she had ideas to photograph herself, covering parts of her body with this shield as it spun into every direction.
Her entire life there has been a photograph of her mothers nude body standing in the sun amidst the pillars of salt and earth.
Could the pizza box meditation option slide into this photo and be there with her mother?
The beautiful ass, the sassy pose Right hand on the hip, leg slightly bent.
Thick auburn hair a perfect bounce of shape absorbing sunlight.
Could it be the shield her mother needed all her life? If it hovered there in the photo.
Every time she walked into the room where the photo was hanging on the back wall, the meditation box was in a different place. Moving according to the four directions. Moving with the wind that still blew in the photo.
But she knew also that her mother had had the shield she needed all her life. The angel with the curved stomach, the wind and the rain and the thanksgiving fires on the beach. The nursing school blues and the being a mom when her mom had already died. Braiding her daughters hair and the tiny blue dishes. The quaker boyfriend and the one with the old truck. The back bedroom with the avocado trees bristling against the windows where her daughter had had the fever and the nightmare of plucked chicken in the victorian bassinet.
Right before she had gone to the desert to cover her body with the box spinning in four directions her mother had sent her a birthday check for 200 dollars. Four months had passed and she couldnt bring herself to deposit the check yet. Not even into her savings account.
Her mother had given her her body, fed her canteloupe from the cooler at the river. Soothed her, bathed her, hit her, driven her crazy. werent all those things enough? The 200 dollar check in all its pure lovingness made her feel she would always be her mothers baby.
It became a shield for that love, tucked still in its birthday card, resting peacefully in a desk drawer.
Deposit the check ask cash in on love
If she could photograph the shield on her body out here in the desert while it spun in the photograph of her mother, she would be able to show the way she felt her mother in her own body everyday.
The way the scrawl of her mothers signature in a book they both loved made her feel her mothers identity as something so distinct and distant yet so familiar. Knowing her mother read and loved this book when she was a young woman, before she was a mom.
This recognition like an old dress or coat you havent put on for years. everytime you meet it is like the first.
and still she walked out into the desert, carrying the meditation box under her arm.
