A Death in The Family

‘A Death in the Family’ is a poetic art object installation on the death-like loss after lesbian no-contact divorce, by artist Cassandra Myers. Proposed to on a wonton spoon, the way  Myers’ wife’s father proposed to her mother, the artist uses fifty wonton spoons as the paper-white medium for hyper-brief poetic phrases on marital loss printed on the spoon faces.

The poems can be read both individually spoon by spoon and as a contrapuntal, strung up in rows behind a window pane for passers-by to engage in brief, cutting, and sensorial fractals of what it means to lose the love of your life to a lack of attunement, a loss of attention, and a missing of each other’s bids for affection. The phrases, making lyric to which no answer arrives, invites the audience to consider their own senseless losses, how someone can be your whole world one second, and dead to you the next.