The Black Box

The Black Box was begun in response to the Maylasian Flight 370, which disappeared in 2014. The recent loss of my wife made this a compelling subject for me, and I became obsessed with it. Among other things, I was struck by the extensive search effort made for it and the 'black box', the flight recorder which was supposed to explain what went wrong. I imagined it laying at the bottom of the India Ocean, in the inky blackness, vainly pinging out its finder signal. How emblematic of humanity! I felt that it was important to speak back to the universl need for explaining unexplainable loss and I quickly realized that I could speak back to this by constructing my own Black Box composed of 3 stacks of 239 sheets of tar paper (one for all of the people lost). On each of these, I pointed an iconic image representing four major world religions, each of them (possibly) offering to make sense for our individual or coperate losses. Isn't that what we expect religion to do? I collapsed the Judeo-Christian traditions into a single stack by using an image of Adam and Eve from the Ghent Altarpiece; a foundational image held in common by both. So, 4 religions, 3 stacks.