Beginning in late 2019, Shaw began painting a simple motif of a chair, over and over. He went on to make hundreds of these paintings in ink and decoupage on leaves of ledger papers and time cards, until in early 2021, with a notebook full of more paintings he wanted to attempt, the painting ended.
In the traditions of many cultures, chairs are left to sit empty for a saint, our ancestors, whomever we call upon in our specific moments, the ones our beliefs tell us are obliged to arise and to sit with us, as a blessing. Shaw painted thousands of chairs and then wrote to them. In words, he placed a memory as an entry in a record, on every chair represented in the painting—these memories that may not, or have not, or will, or will not have happened. He called these writings indictments of memory.
prepositions for elijah explores themes of absence, memory, and loss. This book had never been until now. Gods-willing there will never need to be another twelve indictments of his memory: a man's broken recollection piled upon unhappened futures.
Philip James Shaw, b. 1970 is a folk artist. He grew up in the fields of southeast Kansas and in the suburbs of Arizona in the times of the greatest march of homes eating the surrounding deserts. Then he lived in Seattle for three decades before moving to a windswept land sticking out into the Salish Sea. He is the recipient of the 2022 Fugue Prose Prize, as well as the 2013 Wild Light Award from The Los Angeles Review.
