Almost Heaven
Trinity College Seerveld Gallery
The namesake of this series of images is found on the West Virginia license plate on my grandfather’s Cadillac. The car, pictured in the series, served to crush the piles of cans he collected from roadsides in Fort Myers, FL, during the '90s and 2000s—over a million, carefully logged in notebooks. After crushing them in his driveway, they were bagged, and strapped to a board sticking out of the trunk, for transport to the recycling center, driven by his compulsion to collect and process.
After Hurricane Ian destroyed his mobile home park in 2022, I saw the site of his operation flattened, even further viewed only through my iPhone. I asked my dad for photos from his canning days, and he sent cell phone pictures of film photos he’d taken in the 1990s, re-photographed on a table in his room—his role in this transmission marked in the framing.
As a child I eagerly joined my grandfather on his five a.m. canning rounds, rummaging through dumpsters and sorting the spoils in his driveway. Today, I process endless piles of discarded items at a resale shop, reflecting a society overwhelmed by its own excess. I feel a kinship with my grandfather’s effort—an attempt to contend with whats on hand, to assert agency in the compression of it all.
This compulsion informs my practice. I am both anxious and fascinated by the constant flattening of things, memories, and experiences that surrounds us. Who is to say the value of a can if it informs the ethic of a person? In rehearsing these processes through my work, I aim to explore my grandfather’s strange brilliance and the legacy of his efforts. These reflections resonate with the central concerns of my practice: heritage, inheritance, collection, and the flattening of meaning across personal and societal realms. Through this lens, I confront the objects and histories we inherit, questioning how they shape us.