John Salvest

Words To Live By, 1999

Dean B. Ellis Library, Arkansas State University, Jonesboro, Arkansas, January 1-March 5, 1999

“Whosoever strives unceasingly upward can be saved.” –Goethe

Coffee Calendar, 1998

365 Used Coffee Filters, Date-Stamped and Arranged in Chronological Order, Paper, Glass, Wood, Steel Clips

Dimensions Variable

Kindling, 1998

One thousand cast bronze sticks were scattered throughout the Smoky Hill River Festival grounds. Anyone who found one could keep it.

I thought of the bronze stick as working on several different levels. On one level it served as a game piece in a massive treasure hunt. On another it might serve as a memento of this year's festival. As a component in an artwork, I thought of it as functioning on both an actual and a symbolic level.

Smoke Free, 1998

Wood, Cigarette Butts

1/2″ x 148″ x 244″

Meditation 7.21, 1997

Forum for Contemporary Art, St. Louis, Missouri.

"Soon you will have forgotten the world and soon the world will have forgotten you."

Black River, 1993

Black River came to me in a flash in the summer of 1989 as I drove northbound alone on I–81 just south of Fall Branch, Tennessee, the coalescent product of some half-forgotten road song, a mind made receptive by fatigue and the dimming light, and the gnarled silhouette of a single tire fragment on the highway shoulder.

I pulled over, backed up, and retrieved the rubbery souvenir in the first of countless similar roadside rituals to be performed over the next three years.

Kafka Kaffee Kalendar, 1992

Kansas City Artists Coalition, Kansas City, Missouri, May 1-30, 1992

“He was an artist and a man of such anxious conscience he could hear even where others, deaf, felt themselves secure.”

– Milena Jesenska's Obituary for Franz Kafka

The Myth of Sisyphus, 1991

1354 standard concrete bricks were each stenciled with one word from the text of “The Myth of Sisyphus,” an essay by Albert Camus in which he compares Sisyphus to “the workman of today, whose fate is no less absurd.”

During the course of the exhibition/
performance I carried the bricks, three at a time, up 21 flights of stairs to the top story of the Lincoln American Tower in Memphis, Tennessee. The complete text was gradually laid out in readable form in a room overlooking the Mississippi River. Like Sisyphus' rock, the text was dismantled and the bricks returned to ground level.