Beyond Baroque, Mike Kelly Gallery, LA, CA, 2018

Requiem: Aching for Acker is a body of work that was directly inspired by Requiem, the last piece of writing by counterculture writer Kathy Acker, a friend of mine – on and off – for decades. It was published as the final part of an opera, Eurydice in the Underworld, by Arcadia Books in London in 1997. A risk-taker and literary outlaw, Acker was a hybrid of punk, postmodernism, feminism, and critical theory in her public identity as well as in her literary works. She died of breast cancer on November 30, 1997 at the age of 53, after a double mastectomy and turning her back on Western medicine. I was deeply moved to be a close friend to her in her final days. In Requiem: Aching for Acker, I was looking for a vision to match the feelings: the loss and the power I felt reading her last published book. Something that would remind the world of her power as a creative female force of nature – her self-mythologizing as a form of empowerment and vulnerability. To marry the past and the present in an evocative body of work that speaks to the universality of the path we must all take: the path to the underworld.

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