How to Carry Pain

Curatorial Premise: Working with men, interpret tissue paper accessories handmade by the Lahore-based artist Shazia Mirza. 

I watch a man in the swimming pool's locker room. Successful, brash, usually physically imposing, he pads in wrapped in a towel—torso bare, head hanging low...quiet; reduced. What does he carry beneath the imperviousness manifested in social encounters? He and his wife are a local power couple; they steamroll through conversations and situations. I reflect on the loss of his mother many years ago, to a protracted fight with cancer, and wonder how much pain men carry—kept invisible, and only revealed through forms of armour and ornament.