"The end of you..."
Press Release for "The End of You is the Beginning of the End of Me," PS122 Gallery, 2003
"For this exhibition, Larkey painstakingly re-creates drafts or sketches of well-known works by artists, writers, and musicians who have taken their own lives, using a process whereby the images are projected and enlarged, and then traced down to the smallest detail. Following these artists' hands through their acts of creation, and by extension, into their acts of self-destruction, Larkey creates spare, yet evocative documents of her performance of empathetic self-renunciation. Accompanying the drawings are five sculptures, each of which is a crystal-clear casting of an implement used to commit suicide. Displayed on black pedestals, the sculptures appear to be negative images of the original objects, their dangerous potential arrested through their conversion into aesthetic objects. By creating a kind of afterimage of these tools of self-destruction, Larkey suggests that the awareness of danger, physical or psychological, can be transformed into the sublime by offsetting it, as extinction itself becomes an object for contemplation."
"For this exhibition, Larkey painstakingly re-creates drafts or sketches of well-known works by artists, writers, and musicians who have taken their own lives, using a process whereby the images are projected and enlarged, and then traced down to the smallest detail. Following these artists' hands through their acts of creation, and by extension, into their acts of self-destruction, Larkey creates spare, yet evocative documents of her performance of empathetic self-renunciation. Accompanying the drawings are five sculptures, each of which is a crystal-clear casting of an implement used to commit suicide. Displayed on black pedestals, the sculptures appear to be negative images of the original objects, their dangerous potential arrested through their conversion into aesthetic objects. By creating a kind of afterimage of these tools of self-destruction, Larkey suggests that the awareness of danger, physical or psychological, can be transformed into the sublime by offsetting it, as extinction itself becomes an object for contemplation."
