2,222 was a site-specific installation created and installed on the DIA lawn for the Art On The Move artist residency / mentorship in 1998. I created 49 cylinders filled with thousands of empty liquor bottles gathered from around my neighborhood in Detroit. I had no car back then and walked everywhere, pushing shopping carts to gather materials, just like the scrappers. As part of the program, I worked with / mentored 6 Detroit high school students, who helped me arrange and secure the bottles, while I collected and cleaned them. The cylinders were labeled with dates, names, and stories chronicling my experiences collecting empties. It was a filthy project, like so many of my projects since then, but some of the experiences were tiny epiphanies that have affected me ever since - it’s crazy to read my diary-like labels now and see how I wrote / thought back then. It was an early project and I feel embarrassed by the craftsmanship and my 23-yr-old writing, but I still love how the light danced through the glass, and reading all the labels brings me right back to 1990s Detroit... The work sat on the DIA grounds during the former Detroit Festival of Arts, until I eventually hauled it all back to CCS, where I recycled all 2,222 of the bottles, and left the cylinders wasting away between bldgs. At some point the school got sick of my growing trash heap - I lived in my studio at the college by then, and had nowhere to store anything - so they got rid of them all. But I managed to save one little guy, who’s still rusting away on my studio patio 2 decades later.