A very moving article. I’d love to see this exhibition but it’s in South Pasadena. Hyde, perhaps you’ll be my eyes?
AT the artist Karen Green’s current show, “Sure Is Quiet,” at the Space Arts Center and Gallery here, a flat white bedsheet hangs in the window, embossed with a giant photo of Ms. Green looking lovingly into the eyes of her poodle. A sewn-on pocket features a faint embroidered image, the outline of a man sleeping next to a dog. It is the image of her late husband, the writer David Foster Wallace, who committed suicide two years ago last month, at 46, after a long struggle with depression.
Midway down the sheet, stamped “Medical Center,” are rows of embroidered tally marks representing the number of days Ms. Green, 50, has been a widow. In the pocket is a patient’s right-to-privacy booklet she acquired during a visit to a psychiatrist after Mr. Wallace’s death. Next to the sheet is a yellowing, stained pillow, part of its feathery stuffing removed and strewn on the floor. The dog whose features are embroidered on the sheet died soon after Mr. Wallace’s death.
The poodle, which she adopted three months ago, has been a solace, she said, during these still difficult, emptied-out days.
“I think of it as a funny, sweet, subversive piece,” Ms. Green said of the installation in the window, the day after the show opened on Sept. 25. But her voice caught as she tried to explain the pillow. “David was a big sweater, and I just remember the sweat marks on his pillow when I changed the cases.” …
