Description

Room 2, Airplane Sculpture, "Here We Go."

After the sweeping activity of the video, everything is brought to a halt with the quiet stillness of an airplane suspended just above its pedestal. Its skin is made of black feathers. This pose implies action, and the plane hangs waiting for an eventual crash through the little red circle inscribed on the pedestal. The room is barely blue. Unlike the video, there is no sense of the passage of time here. The plane, hanging from a steel cable in a gallery, exists in a moment that can never end.

The title "Here We Go" comes from the last words on the black box voice recording recovered from the crash site of Alaska Airlines flight 261, which crashed on February 1, 2000. The pilots were fighting a broken section of the plane’s tail and everyone on board was held in a situation that was catastrophically unresolvable. Wthat struck me about this plane crash was that there was a family of 5 on board. As a mother, I am haunted by my imagination of the experiences of everyone in the plane before it hit the ocean, specifically the terrible struggle of the parents who had boarded the flight with their children.

The Flight 261 accident represents my worst fear as a parent; that some confluence of events will come together in such a way as to destroy my children. I think most parents try to be reasonably cautious; some look for dangers where there are none, perhaps to reassure themselves that they are capable of controlling the uncontrollable. But for us all there is always the specter of the freak accident, from which no amount of preparation can save you. This is well put by Genevieve Jurgensen, author of The Disappearance, as she describes learning that her two children were killed by a drunk driver:

“In order for this to happen, there was an extraordinary accumulation of concordant circumstances. If just one of them had been omitted, no one would have known what sort of disaster we had escaped. I will tell you about all these circumstances. Because their enumeration also tells you something of the life we led, what connections we had and the limitations of our power.

The telephone rang in the stillness of the apartment and we too were chosen as targets. During the course of the conversation, in the few sentences that it took to reach the explosion, we realized that the cannons were adjusting their aim and we had to offer ourselves to their missiles.”

So, where do these tragic events fit in with “How Nature Works”? The airplane is ominous. It is a man-made object clothed like my symbol for natural patterns, the birds. The marriage of these two elements indicates that even the most carefully engineered elements of our constructed lives are subject to the chaos of chance, or maybe destiny, that can fall onto us like a hammer. But as the video shows us, chaos is not really chaotic at all but a small element that finds a place in the patterns forever formed by Nature. The seeming capriciousness of Nature is the irreconcilable problem of parenthood: you become more vulnerable to loss than you ever thought possible.