I wrote a song titled “Civil War.” It has a repeated refrain: “The thirst wouldn’t wait — yeah, we burned, burned down the gate.”

In the song, I conjure dark, tragic images, the results of when tribalism and hatred take hold and the gates of hell are flung open: Like moths to a flame, the people rush in.

Though the image of a burning gate appears prominently in this installation, I intend its associative possibilities to be much broader than those in the lyrics. I only bring them up as one possible way in. Along with moths and flames, another motif I’ve been working with are flowers. I am interested in combining a certain exuberance and visual pleasure with the idea of nature gone haywire—collapse and decay. The slideshow consists of stock images of flowers along with images I photographed off a television screen from the movie House of Wax (1953). In the film, the artist (played by Vincent Price) who sculpts the “lifelike” wax figures becomes wildly unhinged when they are destroyed in a fire. Wax melts, flowers wilt.

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