The Years Made Flies is a culmination of Luther Price’s larger than life figurative work made between 1982-1985. With the exception of one large sculptural installation, Eat Fuck Live Shit Want Need - comprised of wall panels and eleven human and animal figures, made in 1986 - the work in the exhibition marked the end of the artist’s preoccupation with sculpture. Now largely known for his film and performance-based works, the exhibition reveals a prolific period when Price built out his recollections of childhood in the 1960s three-dimensionally. The works on view were made while Price was a student at Massachusetts College of Art and Design (the first independent public art college in the US), shortly prior to suffering a life-altering gunshot wound in Nicaragua in 1985. Speaking about the incident, Price says, “i died when i was 23… it wasn’t just my guts that spilled out that day….” 

If this early sculptural work provided a way to work through childhood trauma - the death of his aunt by an overdose on the day that Price was born - his spoiled bodies, dead babies, and birthing figures, formed by the process of layering fabric, dirt, plastic, and metal, also inadvertently serve as a haunting premonition of the wound-mending the artist would endure as a young adult. He describes the period following the shooting, “I RETURNED BACK TO MASS ART THAT FALL ON CRUTCHES........WITH A HOLE IN MY SIDE, STUFFED WITH GAUZE.........THE DRESSING HAD TO BE CHANGED THREE TIMES A DAY, SO I USED THE NURSE’S OFFICE FOR THAT,....THE ONLY STERILE PLACE........FOR THAT..............AS THE SEMESTER WENT ON, I BECAME VERY SICK....THE WOUND WAS NOT HEALING................SO DURING XMAS BREAK I ADMITTED MYSELF BACK INTO THE HOSPITAL........THEY FOUND THE BULLET......AND REMOVED IT ...........IT WAS LODGED IN THE DARKNESS OF MY HIP ........NEVER CAME UP ON THE X-RAYS..........THE US OFFICIALS CONFISCATED MY MEDICAL RECORDS FROM NICARAGUA FROM THE DOCTOR WHO TRAVELED WITH ME BACK TO THE STATES.............SO, I NEVER HAD A CHANCE........THE DOCTORS NEVER KNEW THE BULLET WAS STILL INSIDE ME.......ROTTING AWAY MY BONE AND GUTS ........KILLING ME SLOWLY..........BY THIS TIME,....MUCH OF MY HIP HAD TURNED TO A PUSSY MUSH........... AND A LARGE PART OF MY LOWER INTESTINE HAD TO BE REMOVED AS WELL...........MY RIGHT LEG HAD GONE INTO COMPLETE ATROPHY...........AND THE NERVE DAMAGE WAS BEYOND REPAIR.................. BUT THE GOOD THING WAS,.......AFTER THEY TOOK THE BULLET OUT ........MY WOUND COMPLETELY HEALED IN 9 DAYS.................I WENT BACK TO SCHOOL IN THE SPRING SEMESTER.....STILL ON CRUTCHES............AND COMPLETED MY LAST LARGE SCULPTURAL PIECE............‘EAT FUCK LIVE SHIT WANT NEED’........1986.”