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7 DAYS IN DECEMBER
Lawndale Art Center
Houston, Texas
2025
7 DAYS IN DECEMBER
Lawndale Art Center
Houston, Texas
2025
7 DAYS IN DECEMBER
Lawndale Art Center
Houston, Texas
2025
7 DAYS IN DECEMBER
Lawndale Art Center
Houston, Texas
2025
7 DAYS IN DECEMBER
Lawndale Art Center
Houston, Texas
2025
7 DAYS IN DECEMBER
Lawndale Art Center
Houston, Texas
2025

7 Days in December is a durational performance in homage to the flood of hurricane Harvey, and the Neal's own relationship to suicide. Sitting beneath a running shower, for six hours a day, the artist's body rencounters the flood of memory. In an intimate encounter with despair, faith, and the will to continue, the artist uses the shower as a symbol for the relentless waters of despair. In 2017 a natural disaster in the Gulf of Mexico took the home of the artists grandparents, along with everything in it. That same year, Neal made an attempt on his own life. In both instances the artist comes up against the precipice of total destruction, and asks how do we continue? 

For six hours a day, for seven consecutive days, Neal sat directly beneath a running stream of water situated within an art gallery in Houston, Texas. Neal began by wearing a full suit, and removed one article of clothing each day, until ending the piece full nude. The water logged clothes were removed at the end of each day, and dropped on the gallery floor. The artist would then dry himself with a red towel which hung on the gallery wall for the remainder of the piece

 

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"The water itself came to be a personal symbol of time, that we are pelted with it and assaulted with it and that our lives just keep going and that can feel unbearable sometimes... eventually, you begin to feel the sense that there is no beginning. There is no end. I’m just in the current of my life and it is something that I will bear."

                                                                                                //

Read the accompanying essay here

Read Neal's interview here

Jax Neal dries off at the end of day 3. Photo by Sol Diaz-Peña
Photos by Sol Diaz-Peña

TEAM

ARTIST 
Jax Neal


FABRICATORS 
Moon Papas Art
Matt Fries
Boston Kassidy 





 

LAWNDALE ART CENTER
Anna Walker
Jeremy Johnson 
Tamirah Collins

PHOTOGRAPHY
Sol Diaz-Peña


 

VIDEOGRAPHY
Yordanos Haile

MUSIC

"A Dream" by Flatsound


 

7 Days in December was funded in partnership between Lawndale Art Center and The Cynthia Woods Mitchell Center for the Arts


Special thank you to Matt Fries and Jeremy Johnson, who, for the duration of this piece attended to the operations of the shower mechanism, including monitoring the water temperature, ensuring a safe environment for the artist. Y'all saved me. 





 

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