Burning Negative-Space Dork

Burning Negative-Space Dork #1
Event and Photo by K.K. Remus Copyright 2014

Burning Negative-Space Dork #2
Event and Photo by K.K. Remus Copyright 2014

This pretend genius-billionaire is on a very real mission--the mission to banish all negativity from the past.  I recently read a Zen parable involving a trapped monkey, whose moral was:  if you want to be free, let go.  For this particular piece of baggage, letting go involved burning the negative space around an image of a colossal dork.

"Negative space" is important to artists.  It's the space surrounding a subject in a composition.  For example, if the subject is a tree, the negative space is everything surrounding the tree.  It this case, the subject was the most colossal dork of all time: The Dorcus Collossus (hereafter, DC). 

To perform this purgative feat, I printed out a photo of DC.  Then, I cut DC out of the picture, and was left with the negative space that had surrounded him. I turned the paper around, stuck the bottom in a tin can, placed the whole shebang on a non-flammable surface of foil and slate, and burned the mo fo down.

In photo number one, you can't see any flames.  In photo number two, you can see a thin plume of flame burning the negative space at the right edge of the absent dork's head.  You can also see curled, scorched paper to the right of this.  The whole thing went "POOF" after this and wasn't worth photographing.  It was just a tin can surrounded by ash.

Why burn negative space?  Well, to me, burning a picture of someone is too easy.  It's perverse in a mundane, obvious way, and it doesn't really mean anything.  It's been done a trillion times.

Burning negative space is more ingenious and to the point.  That is, if someone screwed you over, and they're long gone, isn't it the negative residue surrounding them that you really want to be rid of?