All the Stars in the Sky for 100 Nights
Temporary public project for VAE and Downtown Raleigh Association. Dec.–Jan. 2020.
Photo by Arthur Earnest
About 2500 stars are visible to the naked eye on a clear night. As we approached a quarter-million lives lost to COVID-19, I was thinking about this figure as a kind of poetic denominator in a grim equation. Reckoning with a number like a quarter-million exceeds our direct cognitive grasp. This installation was an attempt to do the math and make the toll (and the gravity of the pandemic) more concrete. But it was also about the inability of a numerical tally even to begin to tell the story in human terms. Plato thought every soul had a corresponding star. Even if we count every one of them for a hundred nights over, what do we know about what we’ve lost?
