Behind a door, a curtain, or a tree—something lurks, something you cannot make out. A murmur, a figure reclined, a place to sit and stretch your legs. The leaves of a tree press and bow against the milky white wall, focusing, unfocusing. Stems of grass brush against looking eyes, barely discerning the shape of a curtain, circular. Its hem kicks up in a breeze.

From where you sit, you have to twist your body to see, down the hallway, across the courtyard, through a doorway. A silhouetted figure moves closer behind the glass "and as you peer closely you see, in the place where the face should be, a splash of white paint." (2) The page flutters and disembodies. The longer you look, the blurrier it all becomes.

Two tatami mats, two tables and two libraries. For some reason everything comes in pairs. It just happened that way. A few things in place that signal a purpose, but nothing stays still. There's a looseness to how we work and orient ourselves, it obscures, so that we are whatever you say we are. Slow and sedimentary. Something mineral refusing to move. Three trees in a forest tangled together. We move like inchworms on that leaf over there—though stillness is not an option. Stillness marks the end of something.

We collect residue of past events. A seed in a crack in the tile, a hook that once carried a lamp, holes in the wall where a shelf used to be. These marks on the body carry memories, we like to think that they will outlast the space itself.

A splash of white paint where the face should be, a word that stops itself. A refusal to be clear, or to clearly know. A hole where a hook used to be. These are only souvenirs (3) of a distant architecture—this show an attempt at transferring sight through the body. Not so many words as a feeling, perhaps, like swallowing a warm tea or a deep garden fluttering against the wall.

Sit in the silence a little while longer.

"In the presence of a word that stops itself, in that silence, one has the feeling that something has passed us and kept going, that some possibility has got free." Anne Carson (2)

mori    September, 2023

(1) Susan Sontag, "Against Interpretation", 1966.
(2) Anne Carson, "Variations on the Right to Remain Silent," A Public Space, Issue 7, 2008.
(3) Susan Sontag, "In Plato's Cave," in On Photography, 1977.    

...shrink