Now and then I tell my husband that if I ever do an exhibit on social or environmental issues, it’ll feature some of the most depressing work imaginable. Famine, plague, baby polar bears drowning as the ice caps melt. The title of the exhibit will be something like “Imagine Despair” or “Imagine Hopelessness,” the antithesis of Hollis Chatelain’s thoughtful “Imagine Hope” exhibit. My latest piece, Leaving, seems to bear that out.

Leaving was inspired by the story of a homeless man, Hugo Alfredo Tale-Yax. During the early part of 2010, he was stabbed while saving a woman, a stranger to him, from an assailant. Unfortunately, none of the almost 25 people who strolled by as he lay dying on the sidewalk could be troubled to help him. (However, one person did stop to take photos with his cell phone camera.) Thus, the title Leaving refers not only to the figure on the sidewalk, who is gradually leaving his life, but the bystanders who are leaving the scene.

This ghastly event is symptomatic of the plight of homeless people in general: to be homeless is to be invisible and be robbed of one’s humanity. For various reasons, many of us avoid so much as making eye contact with the homeless, avoid acknowledging their existence. Perhaps we fear being approached by strangers, fear getting hit up for money, or we prefer to donate to charity rather than getting involved with individuals. Perhaps, like a former acquaintance, we view the homeless with outright contempt.

The end result is that when we see a homeless person, we mentally make the person invisible. We walk by him (or her) as though he doesn’t exist. Unfortunately, it appears that many of us can blank out a person so thoroughly that he can literally bleed to death on the sidewalk without our realizing or bothering to intervene. What a horror that is.

There is a dual tragedy here, then, beyond the story of the homeless good samaritan who received no help himself. We’re robbing people of their humanity, and when we gain the ability to “unperson” others, we also lose some of our own humanity.

Compositionally, Leaving is a fairly stark piece. The subject matter is so grim that it seemed necessary to get some distance from it, reducing the players to bare outlines and essentials. The figure of the dying man shares some DNA with the chalk outlines of crime scene victims.

It was rendered in watercolor on soy-sized cloth, about which I’ll write another time. Some texture and perhaps another layer of meaning were added by stitching EKG waveforms into the background. As the blood and life ebb out of the person, the nature of the waveform changes, until it flatlines altogether.

I’d like to acknowledge and thank the following people plus a couple of others who declined to be named: Andee Wasson, Charlotte Dehgan, Cynthia Wenslow, Katherine McNeese, and Tobi Hoffman. When I asked the somewhat bizarre question of what a dying person’s EKG waveform might look like, they related information from a professional perspective, as well as personal stories of seeing friends and loved ones die. Any errors in rendering are, of course, mine.

Leaving will be part of SAQA’s exhibit No Place to Call Home, traveling to Mancuso Shows from August 2010 through May 2011. Accompanying twenty works by other artists, it will visit Manchester, NH; Philadelphia, PA, Santa Clara, CA; West Palm Beach, FL; Hampton, VA; Somerset NJ; and Denver, CO. Stay tuned for additional details.