David’s Dirty Diaper

It turns out that I am an artist. Who knew? And this is my art:

It is currently exhibited as part of a “Dirt Museum” temporarily on view at the Lobby Gallery of UBC’s Liu Institute for Global Issues.

The genesis of the Dirt Museum is a visit by anthropologist Diane Nelson, who was invited here a couple of months ago by a working group that I help run on “Latin America and the Global.” As part of her visit, she facilitated a rather interesting workshop, “Playing with Dirt”, whose aim was to “focus on the language and imagery of dirt as both a thing (soil, earth, what feeds us) and a metaphor of a person or a communities’ subjective positioning. We will ask participants (faculty and students) to bring a thing and/or image from their own field sites for the ‘dirt museum,’ and use it to create a critical dialogue on the usage of dirt.” The item I suggested for the workshop, and now for the subsequent exhibition, was a dirty diaper from my son.

The interesting thing is that, even though the diaper is presented in a sealed jar, it was felt by the curators to be altogether too insalubrious to be placed on a table with other exhibits. So it was put on the floor, under the table. A little too dirty even for a “Dirt Museum.”