Me: Your Daughter, Him: Your Miller deals with the persistence of interpersonal wounds after a death and the way societal violence—such as misogyny—may interrupt our relationships and hinder the process of mourning.

In the year following my father’s death, I mourned him in part by retracing his steps through the literature he had loved while he was alive. This brought me to Henry Miller’s autobiographical novel: Tropic of Cancer. In journals from my father’s mid twenties, he describes himself as a nearly fanatical admirer of Miller—the journals from the period emulate Miller’s wit and Miller’s language. Though I knew enough to anticipate some misogyny, some racism, and some expatriate arrogance, what I encountered in the text was intolerable. The resulting question was compulsive: How can someone have idolized this language and also have, or love, an adult multiracial daughter?

In the creation of Me: Your Daughter, Him: Your Miller, I consolidated the effect of Henry Miller’s misogynistic language by cutting every incident of the word “cunt,” “bitch,” “whore,” “wench,” or concisely misogynistic phrases, such as “…if rape is the order of the day, then rape I will, and with a vengeance..” or, “…You can pinch her ass if you like...” from Tropic of Cancer. These were interspersed with handwritten cuttings of similar phrases from a journal my father had kept in his mid-twenties. The total collection of misogynistic clippings was then resin-cast over the reflective surface of a full-length mirror that had been a gift from my father to myself.

This piece was installed at the Gallery of Visual Arts in Missoula, MT in 2016