Happy art, happy farming, happy living!

He is also currently exhibiting in Weill Cornell’s Medical Offices on West 72nd Street in Manhattan.

"All God's Children," created by Elias Melad while in residence at chaNorth

Be regular and orderly in your life, so that you may be violent and original in your work.
—Gustave Flaubert

I cook (woop) I cook (woop) I cook (woop) I cook (woop)…
—Lil B

When people speak of writerly work habits, a usual line-up of characters walks into the room: monks, hermits, vampires. Writers have the reputation of being solitary individuals, of violently sequestering themselves from the world and sunlight in order to make their art. While there is some truth in this, the analogy that perhaps best suits me is that of a cook in an almost empty diner: that is, someone who keeps a few things going on the burners of his mind, someone who spends time among the living and the half-dead, gathering ingredients, making notes, reading the illegible scrawl of waitresses, listening to the faint sounds of a few weary patrons in the dining area and offering nourishment.
When I started seriously writing my novel, I had no less than six very different ideas, six pots of various stock, on the stove. There came a point, about four years ago, when I had to turn off the heat on the other five burners and devote my energies to one story that felt, at the time, more urgent than the rest: a young man who goes off to college and falls into a political cult.
So it simmered. A few more months of cooking turned the brothers at the center of the story Ethiopian-American, and the father, formerly alive and grouchy, wound up a victim of Ethiopia’s repressive communist regime. Sorry, Dad. After another year and a half on the stove, the narrative voice caramelized from first person to third, and I extracted the older brother altogether, focusing solely on the complex relationship between the young college student, his immigrant mother, and their well-meaning but troubled family friend.
When I applied for the chaNorth residency, I was at a pivotal point in drafting the novel and feeling painfully stuck. I knew I had one last climactic section to write in which Teddy’s mother and their family friend infiltrate the cult to rescue Teddy. But the din of city life (money worries, social responsibilities, bad Internet habits, lack of a real schedule, etc.) was proving too loud. Once again, I needed to turn off the other burners and start really cooking.
Almost immediately after I settled into my studio chaNorth, that is exactly what happened. My creative oven seemed pre-heated in a way. I could hear my own voice again and used every last hour of my residency to finish the novel. I wrote seventy pages in a little over two weeks. And without doubt, the psychic comfort, camaraderie, and sense of shared struggle I felt every night after I left the dining area with the other residents became its own kind of nourishment.
So, after five years on the stove, which included three restarts and two final years of high-temperature focus, on November 6th, a Sunday, I was in my chaNorth studio when I wrote the two most joyous and satisfying (yet fraudulent and heartbreaking) words a novelist ever writes: “The End.”
Over course The End is never really the end, and in my last days at chaNorth, I discovered a new way to begin my novel. I wanted the story to open with a different kind of flavor from the rest of the book, an appetite-whetting snapshot of Teddy’s mother alone as a young woman in the early 1980s, a new immigrant to Washington D.C. What follows is a brief excerpt from that opening prologue:

Many, many yesterdays ago, there was a young woman standing at a payphone squinting at one of the top windows of a rooming house. She was trying to reach a man. She’d tried his buzzer, and now she was trying his phone. Still: no answer.
In a shop across the street, she paid for a coffee in nickels and dimes and came up a couple pennies short. The counterwoman grumbled and shut the register gruffly. Merry Christmas. The young woman smiled, thanked her, and cradled her warm paper cup to the window to sip it until it was very cold and the sun had left the street for good.
It was okay that no lights had come on in the man’s window. She had nowhere special to be. She could wait for a long time.
She had something to tell him.
When a dark figure finally stopped in front of the rooming house, fishing in his coat for a key, she crossed the intersection at a run. The brakes of a bus howled at her.
Panting, she tapped the man’s shoulder. When he whipped around, startled, she saw it was not him. A little spook of breath came trembling out of the old man’s grimace. He looked the young woman up and down.
She explained as best she could—she was still learning the language—and continued to point up at the man’s window, saying his name. The old man understood, smiled, and turned his key in the door. She crept up the staircase hardly suspecting that, behind her, the old man was twisting his head to get a peek up her dress. The halls smelled like trash, and when she arrived at the man’s door, she found it open.
She reached up for a thin chain and pulled down light.

My work at chaNorth allowed me the opportunity to discover many interesting discarded items left on the property. I became a detective searching for clues of the past hidden in the dirt. Each piece of trash became my treasure.
I collected and arranged the buried rubbish from four dumpsites to create narratives in the landscape. I took on the roles of Archeologist, Anthropologist, Botanist, Sculptor, and Photographer while working in the site. I uncovered many clues to the past. I used found items of past belongings of humans, remnants of animals and a selection of plants to make compositions of wall hangings and functional object installations throughout the site. While working in the woods, I felt inspired to maintain and mark the trails with signs for direction. The goal was to engage the audience with both the history and natural setting of the site.
Consideration to the natural world through guardianship and communal gatherings among both humans and the natural world were apparent to the effort. Competition for dominance was the prevalent idea that influenced the work. This concept seemed to occur naturally yet the presence of artificial human debris was in direct opposition to its surrounding naturally growing materials.

Click on each image to enlarge.

Title: Dream of Kun
Medium: Dyed mulberry paper
Size: 19×14
Year: 2009