When my shadow
overlaps your shadow
Who is the new one?
various works, 2019
sticks, pot; salt, sound; chair wax; twin pots, video, paper; rocks, figure, figures
There is a pile of stones that a figure places slowly on their torso
Twin pots, each containing a video: one of a figure tearing white fabric, one of eggshells being crushed
A wooden chair stands, covered in white wax
Sticks are piled and balanced a top of a large empty pot hidden in its base, as a den or burrow
40 tiny poems are written in salt, scattered on the floor; instructions are given to viewers regarding this element
These poems are also whispered, barley audibly from the drop ceiling in the hallway, sounding like mice
Tiny Poems, Salt and Sound, a few notes:
When something exists next to where-something-no-longer-exists both of these things change. Presence and absence are now each something new, and something new together. In this work, the viewer is asked to participate in the erasing, or, possibly, I would propose: the metamorphosing (or even metabolizing), of language and image:
each of the following,
ground words
is intended only for
your eyes and mine
I ask, if you decide to read,
that you brush each salt word away
as it’s being read. You may use:
your hand
your shoe
your breath
Try to keep the words with you,
in your memory and your body.
‘Tiny poems, Salt and Sound’ thinks first of the temporal—specifically the fleeting; a fleetingness that is like wind or breath— which seems like a moment, but rather, exists more continuously or cyclically (in fact the opposite of fleeting). We privilege something that we think we have a certain ability to hold onto. This work proposes another way of holding onto something: in our body and in the place that we share a space with. We continue to breath it (and remember, we often forget that we’re breathing, but our bodies don't).
There is also a movement of intimacy here. How does something change and how does something’s value change, when it is only for you, me and the place? How does this same thing change when you are asked to share the holding of this thing with me, just as you continue to hold a space in a place with many other holders? As I invite you into something, and I also invite your neighborhood into something, and I invite the person that came before you and after you into something else, and sometimes you overlap with that other someone and sometimes you overlap but you don’t even realize it: how does this all change the thing? How does this all make the thing? How is this all the thing?