Complete the Day
haircut to look spiffy for
wife’s birthday
on the head before
spending the evening
at a friends house.
people doing the work
and talk to them”
is full of people
who love her.
feeling loved and safe.
Complete the Day
Imagine a memorial not as a hard, static monument listing names of the deceased but as a soft, accumulating textile archiving everyday moments of lives lost. This is Complete the Day: a website archive memorial to the incomplete days of the lives abruptly ended by gun violence.
Complete the Day began as an individual research project and installation. I transcribed a hypothetical choreography of my dad’s unfinished workday, June 28, 2018 at the Annapolis Capital Gazette onto silk fabric Post-its and adhered them to the gallery walls. With an active fan, these roughly 100 transparent notes ghostly fluttered about the retired office dangling from pipes, walls, and the ceiling. In interviewing my dad’s former coworkers for this project, I learned of a playful and stingingly poignant exchange of a highlighter green Post-it that read “Spectrum of Shit” with his friend, a younger reporter. Shortly after this exchange, an active shooter entered the newsroom and killed five people including my dad.
The Post-it is an everyday tool we use for passing notes, for reminding ourselves of things we need to do later. Complete the Day is a collection of notes to our loved ones lost to gun violence, and reminders to the public of what is taken by gun violence.
This website serves as a nexus for this project, digitally collecting Post-its for other victims. In time, these Post-its will be transcribed to silk and installed in corresponding cities, beginning in Baltimore, MD.
Complete the Day began as an individual research project and installation. I transcribed a hypothetical choreography of my dad’s unfinished workday, June 28, 2018 at the Annapolis Capital Gazette onto silk fabric Post-its and adhered them to the gallery walls. With an active fan, these roughly 100 transparent notes ghostly fluttered about the retired office dangling from pipes, walls, and the ceiling. In interviewing my dad’s former coworkers for this project, I learned of a playful and stingingly poignant exchange of a highlighter green Post-it that read “Spectrum of Shit” with his friend, a younger reporter. Shortly after this exchange, an active shooter entered the newsroom and killed five people including my dad.
The Post-it is an everyday tool we use for passing notes, for reminding ourselves of things we need to do later. Complete the Day is a collection of notes to our loved ones lost to gun violence, and reminders to the public of what is taken by gun violence.
This website serves as a nexus for this project, digitally collecting Post-its for other victims. In time, these Post-its will be transcribed to silk and installed in corresponding cities, beginning in Baltimore, MD.