About the work

The boat was once named *Relief*. It had a simple blue stripe around its hull, which you can just make out under the dust. Its owner, a man whose hands were always stained with engine grease, thought it was a joke, a bit of defiant irony in a life that offered little of either. He kept it pristine, polishing the chrome, checking the oil, even when the water receded so far that the local newspaper ran a piece about the lake being "less a body of water, more a suggestion." Now the boat just sits there, a misplaced object, waiting for a water it no longer expects. He loved that boat, but he never learned to swim.