The Specimen

  A silk-printed photograph of a marble male face, mounted on a custom steel base and enclosed beneath an antique glass dome — five metal spikes penetrating the image like pins in an entomological display. The format is deliberate: a specimen case that both preserves and exposes, protecting what's inside while keeping it perpetually on view.
The piece is a meditation on father absence — the five spikes representing the family members left to carry the weight of that abandonment, the marble face standing in for the father figure himself. Cold, classical, beautiful, and utterly unreachable. The glass dome holds the trauma in suspension: visible, contained, but never fully resolved. The Specimen doesn't treat father absence as exceptional. It treats it as exactly what it is — common, heavy, and permanently lodged in the body of those left behind.