i. Candies gush across the ground. They clot and pool. Where the pale floorboards converge against the wall, they glitter in a long stream of plastic-wrapped sweets, the sort you’d see on a receptionist’s desk. Red, yellow, green, swirled…
I spent a while trying and failing to write this essay. Which is to say, most of the time writing it was preparatory, an incubation of ideas and half-spun connections. For me, writing at its most effective is an exercise in surprising intersections and deliberate chaos. I usually can’t predict or control what will be successful.
When I visited the National Portrait Gallery in DC last summer, with one of my best friends from high school, the exhibit by Felix Gonzalez-Torres took hold of me. His stacks of black paper and heaps of candy and tangled strands of lights. I just couldn’t figure out what to say about it. I’d never written about art, and the prospect was daunting.
A few options unspooled. I’d just been in a moderately serious car crash, for instance, which faintly echoed the proximity to death that appears in Gonzalez-Torres’s work. But something was still missing. I read interviews with the artist, looking for guidance. There, his voice was so vividly alive. So brilliant, heartbreaking, and real.
Then I received the phone call about my grandfather, that he believed he had dementia. Time became strangely unmoored. Effect, cause, and all that jazz—can you have an answer before you’re asked the question? Can you begin to grieve before a loss is realized or even announced?
In writing this essay, those two threads tangled together of their own accord. I became fascinated by instantiation and preservation. Love and grief suffuse Gonzalez-Torres’s art, but the works themselves are also repeated again and again. They defy mortality by insisting on it ceaselessly. I still have the piece of candy that I took from Ross, unopened, waiting. I still talk to my grandfather often, as if everything is the same.
In the end, I settled on a dual approach to portraiture, a kind of subject-as-metaphor. This essay tries to embody the very act it describes. To memorialize through the analysis of memorial. If you read it, maybe you’ll carry a piece of us with you, just like I do with Ross. On these pages, my grandfather and I will always be here, for a moment, forever. I think that’s all that any of us can hope for.
DAVIN FARIS is a student at St. John’s College in Annapolis, Maryland. When he isn’t studying philosophy, he loves climate activism, hiking, and dancing. His writing has been featured in The New York Times, Patagonia, Humana Obscura, and others. He was nominated for a Pushcart Prize in 2024. He’s a submission reader and book reviewer for ONLY POEMS. His grandfather, Randy Mack, recently published a explorative memoir entitled The New Era of Radiant Aging. Find Davin on Instagram @davinmfaris.
