brand new

brand new is a site-specific installation about the daily energy needed to keep on going — about the labor of self-maintenance after events that seep deeply into the psyche, about taking the possibilities back, steadying on a path of one’s choosing, unabashed, enduring, brand new from all that has painfully happened.

My white coats from the cleaners come on hangers every time, regardless of whether I sent them with one in the first place. In general, I need a clean white coat every week, with some exceptions depending on how many contagions I encounter in a day. And in time, the hangers accumulate in my office, growing into a pile of past tense — by the hundreds now.

The installation gathers these hangers and uses them to hold white shirts found in thrift stores — surrogates for the coats themselves, garments that have already had a life with other bodies before being brought here. White is the color that has been asked to carry both innocence and respectability — the wedding dress and the work uniform, the baptismal gown and the surgical scrub, the laundered shirt and the burial shroud. The white shirt cannot conceal what touches it. The cleaning is what allows the next day to begin.

The stains on these shirts, sometimes mended with silver linings and safety pins, sometimes left to disappear off and into thin air, untouched, stand in for the cumulative residue of clinical labor — not just my own, but the labor of the many bodies that have worn similar uniforms over similar years.

The cluster of shirts hangs from the ceiling on the wires that have carried them. Below the cluster, an empty black pedestal stands — the position the venerated medical professional is meant to occupy. At the pedestal’s foot, on the floor, two shirts have fallen. The pedestal cannot hold them. The cleaning cannot restore them. What the position requires and what the body that occupies it can sustain are not the same thing.

The title carries the cleaner’s promise — brand new — that each week’s coat returns as if untouched, ready to begin again. The work is what is left after that promise has been kept many times in a row, by many bodies, across years that no individual practitioner could fully account for alone.