Performed November 17, 2018 at Track 16 gallery in Los Angeles

Accompanied by a live caged canary, using her yellow painted fingernails to scratch through the black paint blocking the vast tenth floor gallery window, Hughes gradually revealed the lights of the city, enacting the desire to emerge from darkness into light, clarity and collectivity while allowing dissonance and desperation to be part of the process. The sounds of fingernail on glass, black soot of paint and physical strain could be interpreted as trials of entering the symbolic realm for women in particular. The potentially destructive instinctual behavior of scratching became music, in concert with the bird, and mark-making, engaging conversations about culture, philosophy, media, the commons and ecology. The title is drawn from Duchamp’s Fresh Widow, his punning small window sculpture with black leather panes relating to the veiled widows of WWI. The widow and the canary, used as a sensitive indicator of poisonous environments, elicit feelings of loss and pollution while also conveying, according to Sean Meredith, a “love poem to community both globally and within our own city.”