On Mark Calderon's Untitled 2012
December 2016 Made before Trayvon Martin's murder, but exhibited many times since, Mark Calderon's Untitled 2012 was meant as a metaphor for a broken spine - expressing 'a sense of emptiness or longing'. But I saw it far more encouragingly as a specter instead. All modes of being are relational haunts. To say America is a haunted country is as obvious and unpoetic as observing nitrogen content in the air. I find this piece attractive partly because it's only as ghoulish as humans already are - a hood as pointed as a white one, sleeves chicly designed to balloon over wrists. It's not pinned to the wall like an inanimate piece of evidence, it hovers. I don't see the droop of a spine at all. I see hidden muscle. Contrary to the despair Calderon imagined, I found this to be inspiring and wholesome - it's rare we get to be the ghost instead of the house.