It included seven seventeen-by-seventeeninch towers representing the seven-month period, and twenty-six twelve-by-twelveinch towers for the twenty-six-week period. There were also another 172 towers of varying sizes that completed the piece. “It was something I had to do. I didn’t let myself say, ‘This is exhausting.’ You’re alive, and you’re telling a story.” The most difficult part, he says, was the installation. “Installing the piece was a countdown again: here’s this day, here’s that day. It was like letting it go a little bit—it’s only been a year and a few months since it happened.” Shortly after finishing and exhibiting the work, he deconstructed it and rid himself of it piecemeal. Some towers were given to friends; others were sold with proceeds going to the Vanderbilt Cancer Research Center. Completing it allowed him to return to the studio reinvigorated, and it gave rise to the newest material he’s working with. “The drywall pieces are an extension of that,” he explains. When I first walked into Charles’s apartment, I spotted what looked like a framed hole in the wall, which I come to understand is the beginning of a drywall piece. Creating a drywall hole, it turns out, is no less meticulous than cutting out the paper shapes. It’s a little more involved than falling on a treadmill and going through a wall ass-first, which is my only experience with deconstructing drywall. “I bust a hole into the drywall from the front, which blows everything in the back, but you still get a pretty opening. So that’s when I take a hammer from the back, and a little more finesse comes into it because you’re tacking a little bit of the drywall, pulling it apart, pulling up two or three layers of that paint, and revealing some of the substructure of the drywall. Then I’ll take a hammer and kind of etch off some of that paper that covers up the sheetrock.” None of his drywall work has been featured yet, but when it is, try to see it. Once the piece is complete, the holes don’t look like the product of hours of investment, excruciating travail with a hammer and fingernails. It’s by far his most organic, lifelike work. The drywall holes are less stylized
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