Lament Series

 Hello, my name is Jeremy Grant and I'd like to tell you a little bit about my series Laments. I think we are in a really interesting time in human history where we have the ability to experience tragedy and injustice at a rate that we are just unable to process. Our online experience of just a few minutes can take us to school shootings, police brutality, the horrors of genocide all in real time, and that digitally connected experience. while it's an incredible tool for shining light on the needs of people all around the globe, it's also overwhelming and can be paralyzing because it's emotionally schizophrenic. It's interwoven with, you know, funny pet memes and TikTok dances and comedians doing crowd work. We have all this noise.

I started this series of Laments in 2020. I was thinking about George Floyd, and not only the tragedy of his murder, but the weight of systemic injustice that was being highlighted by the Black Lives Matter movement. I was just trying to slow down and not scroll to the next meme or avoid, but to take time to listen and feel, and since that time, the tragedies have just kept rolling in. There's constantly another school shooting. You know, police brutality has not stopped. There are always natural disasters and, and griefs that we are connected to. So my ongoing attempt to slow down was to create Laments as a physical process to physicalize the griefs expressed to me and the griefs that I experienced in my own life.

As I created more of these collages, I started to understand them as perhaps existing in a similar space to mazes and mandalas and other types of visual aids for meditation and emotional regulation. And while these Laments pieces sort of ended up acting like studies, the forms and influences from them went on to inform other works that I made. They, themselves ended up just being for me, sitting in a tub in my studio for a few years.

This year, earlier this year, I pulled them out again and discovered that they were warped. The wood panels had warped. The collages were dusty and weathered and wrinkled. It was decidedly non archival condition. I felt like I had sort of unearthed a series of artifacts and so I was inspired to revisit these works with that in mind and I set about a task of preserving and representing them.

I encased them in resin and sanded that resin down to a smooth surface, which often took down bits and layers of the collage and the process too. I worked beeswax into the finish to give them a sort of gentle sheen, sort of unassuming. And then I wrapped them in a rugged steel edging, which I felt like gave them a protective contrast to the ephemeral paper underneath. I think lament is something that needs a physical response. It's a process I think, of recognizing and honoring grief.

It's a physical response to tragedy or injustice that doesn't bypass our difficult experiences. It affirms and validates them. And I think it's something that expands our emotional landscape, which helps us to have space so we can move through grief toward action.