“The Heart Of America” -2020

A heart — real, once beating — is fixed to an armature and sealed inside a plexiglass box. There it remains. Slowly, deliberately, decomposing.

The heart has long been understood as more than muscle. It is the seat of empathy, of compassion, of our capacity to recognize one another's humanity. To feel what another feels. To care. When we speak of a person without empathy, we say their heart is cold. When we speak of cruelty dressed as conviction, we say the heart has hardened.

This heart is doing neither. It is simply rotting. Quietly. Visibly. Under glass, where it cannot be ignored and cannot be denied.

Empathy is not a luxury. It is the connective tissue of a functioning society — the thing that holds us to one another, that makes the word us possible at all. When it fails, when we lose our capacity to feel the weight of another's suffering, we do not simply become unkind. We become something that cannot hold together. We come apart. We decay.

We are doing this to ourselves. Not an outside force, not an invading threat — us. Americans. Choosing, again and again, to harden rather than soften. To turn away rather than toward.

The piece does not accuse. It observes. It documents. It asks only one question — the same question a coroner asks when they pick up a pen and reach for the form:

What killed this?

Cow heart, wire armature, plexiglass $3,000 (available)