Elliott Hundley, Incandescent Tangle VIII, 2008. Gift of Candace and Michael Barasch. © Elliott Hundley
Diary Entry #12: Lazarus or Resurrection
by Diannely Antigua
It was two days after my 20th birthday
when a corpse rose to greet me
from the confines of the basement. He was
a secret friend, liked cookies
and beer. Once, I read him a book
about a boy who bribed girls in dresses
to climb coconut trees. Once,
I read him a Sears catalogue
and we pretended to own a new mattress.
I thought it could be a cure, to perform
comfortable flesh. Until this, I hadn’t
touched a dead body. Until this
I always worried about the mess,
what it meant to outgrow
one’s familiar contents. And I know
there is a song about the wind
and a candle, and I’d like to think of air
as an accident in all the right places. I’d
like to think of my mouth
as its window.
Published November 3, 2019
Diannely Antigua is a Dominican American poet and educator, born and raised in Massachusetts. Her debut collection Ugly Music (YesYes Books, 2019) was the winner of the Pamet River Prize. A graduate of the MFA program at NYU, she is the recipient of fellowships from CantoMundo, Community of Writers, and the Fine Arts Work Center Summer Program. Her poems can be found in Washington Square Review, Bennington Review, The Adroit Journal, and elsewhere. Her heart is in Brooklyn.
Elliott Hundley’s dynamic sculptures, collages, and paintings employ cut photographs, natural objects, urban detritus, paint, stick pins, and countless other materials, giving them an ephemeral, ad hoc effect in a gallery space. Often Hundley’s work features dramatic narrative arcs found in classic epic poetry and plays, contrasting the fragility of the materials with a loose plot line that the viewer can follow. Hundley’s work has a large art historical pedigree, ranging from the early combine sculptures of Robert Rauschenberg to the provisional minimalism of Richard Tuttle to the elaborate narrative impulses of many contemporary artists.