A fleet of tiny white boats, each on a metal stand and bedecked with a row of wind chimes, sails in mid-air, lit from above by a spotlight. The wind chimes tingle in the breeze of a fan.
Passage, on view through Jan. 31 in the Columbus College of Art and Design’s Beeler Gallery, is surgeon and artist Dr. Robert Falcone’s most recent art installation exploring mortality—and specifically, what happens after we die.
“The question I ask, using a fairly standard transport metaphor of a boat, is what happens to us as we’re transported from this life to the next?” Falcone said. “Where is it we’re going? What happens when we get there?”
These and other questions, Falcone says, have “possessed and obsessed” him for nearly four decades. Falcone’s career as a trauma and critical care surgeon has continually called him to confront the concrete realities and imponderable implications of the end of human lives. But what happens next remains a mystery to him.
“I have had the honor and privilege of helping many people survive and many people pass on to their next lives,” Falcone said. “I’ve been constantly surrounded by death. I’m not surrounded by what happens after that,” Falcone said.
The passing of his second wife, Dr. Anne Miller, in a 1998 car accident led to Falcone’s installation piece Crossing, which was exhibited as his MFA thesis project in CCAD’s Beeler Gallery in 2016.
Passage comes after the death of Falcone’s third wife, Dr. Deborah Meesig, in 2024. In this work, Falcone digs deeper into what becomes of our existence once our embodied earthly lives have ended.
Belief systems around the world offer a range of views on where we go and what we become once we breathe our last. As a medical professional from a Catholic upbringing, Falcone says science also informs his explorations of such large existential questions.
“As far as anyone knows, matter and energy are neither created nor destroyed. They’re simply changed. Everything that exists has always existed and will always exist. How it exists is the question,” Falcone said.
After the exhibition of Passages concludes later this month, the artwork itself will also come to exist in a different form when its materials are disposed of or repurposed.
“Art is meant to be temporal. It’s meant to be impermanent. It’s meant to have a life and a death. It’s meant to cease to exist,” Falcone said. “Everything has a life cycle. And as with everything else, this (installation piece) will die. At the end of this exhibition, this will disappear.”
Dr. Robert Falcone’s Passage is on view in the Columbus College of Art and Design’s Beeler Gallery through Jan. 31, 2026.
