Permanent Collection, South Bend Museum of Art, South Bend, IN.
Michael Lasater. Kansas City Artists Coalition, Kansas City, MO. Solo exhibition, December 13, 2013 – January 14, 2014.
South Bend Museum of Art, South Bend, IN. Solo exhibition, March 10 - July 8, 2012.
and then (2011)
Single-channel HD video, stereo.
Digital photo, digitized archive photo, digital video, text, sampled sound, animation.
My maternal grandmother died in 1925 – my mother was just nine. It was only well into my adulthood that I began to comprehend the grief that overlay all aspects of my mother's life in consequence of her mother's death – a bell rung loudly, resonating across generations and decades.
I've organized this piece poetically – and then I saw – and then I understood – these are lines that I might write at the end of a poem to button up all the words and stanzas that might exist before. John Ciardi in his book How Does a Poem Mean suggests a mobile structure to illustrate how a single final stanza or line can metaphorically balance and even redefine all the stanzas and lines that hang on the preceding side of the poem's point of balance. I think my mother, very late in life, did move across that point of balance. But I'll never really know.