Ritual Project

When faced with the ritual project assignment, the brainstorming process was hilarious. We were meant to spend a minimum of five days repeating an action or series of for 5 - 20 min (Left a lot to the imagination). So I ran with it. Trimming nose hair publicly, walking in circle from crosswalk to crosswalk to crosswalk, etc. My favorite was beating the living bejeezus out of a stuffed animal horse in front of the admin building. What I finally settled on was from an entirely different vein of thought.

My older brother passed away only a few weeks before the semester began with his girlfriend and another friend of his. The wreck was violent the story would be televised and radio broadcast over the first half of the semester.

My brother supported my art fully. In fact he was my original inspiration to draw. I sought to mimic his attempts to understand objects and anatomy in effort to gain his praise. As I grew older, I grew more talented. His talent faded in the wake of substance abuse and decaying mental health. In support along side him in his struggle, I gained a fascination with the aesthetic that seemed to spawn out of his broken new life e experiences. They haunted me and brought me awe.

I continued again an exploration of this aesthetic and he would discuss with me from the insider perspective how I was successful in replicating his creative process and other thing I might not have been considering.

Losing him has been one of the hardest things I've experienced in my life, and my creative process has persisted, only now in light of this great tragedy.

After many ideas about the project, I finally noticed a continued irksome call in the back of my mind to make use of a bag of shoes my brother had given me. They are essentially socks with rubber sole. Given in psychiatric wards, they offer little to help injure staff of the patients that wear them. He'd begun giving them to me and I wore them for two reasons. They were weird, fun, and comfy. They also gave me a chance to metaphorically, walk in his shoes. I've always been interested in his life and the small details. Walking in his shoes was something I'd done numerous time in the past. I used to wear a special pair of Chuck Taylor's covered in blood and soaked with alcohol and mud because of the powerful statement they made in my mind of the life they'd come from and represented.

Originally I'd thought to use them in a ritual performance in the downtown district of State St. It was an area he and his friends spent a lot of time along with many other people from similar walks in the streets. It has also become for locals an uncomfortable visual parallel between the lavish commercial tourism of Santa Barbara and it's marginalized mentally afflicted populous.

In the end, the hyper public nature of the scene was too hard for me to perform in. My second and final choice was in a large well frequented park call Kids World. It had played a large part in both our childhoods, but more in his adulthood. It was a common gathering place for vagrants and he felt comfortable there. It was the first and last place I'd meet his girlfriend. It was also the last place I'd see him. He'd been talking so much about this new girl and we decided as a family to meet her, so we had a small picnic and played bocce ball. The bench we sat and ate at is the same one i lined with his shoes and performed my ritual.

One by one I put each pair of shoes one and said an Our Father. There were six or seven pairs so I said six or seven prayers. I've said an Our Father every time I hear a siren, no matter what it is I'm doing. I stop an make a sign of the cross before saying it and ending with another sign of the cross. The whole ritual performance was done in long, solemn silence. The meditation it provided allowed me for the first time to dissolve the protective wall of numbness and confront my grief. Though hard it was really helpful. As a result of the whole thing I gained a better sense of peace toward my loss. I still shudder every time I hear a siren though.