The Tate has a Tracey Emin photograph in its collection from a road trip/book tour she made in 1995. Monument Valley (Grand Scale) captures Emin in the foreground, sitting on a velvety green sitting-room chair and holding open her book, Exploration of the Soul. Behind her, sandstone buttes rise up out of the desert and lines of white clouds form rows along a blue sky. The book, published in an edition of 200, describes Emin’s childhood, from how she imagines her conception, to birth (with her twin brother, Paul), and through her thirteenth year, in which a violent episode marks her transition to adulthood. Above all, it records the dissolution of her close relationship with her brother. The desert site of the photograph, a sacred tribal land for the Navajo people, is at once austere and dramatic—a counterpoint to the suggestion of a living room and, therefore, family. The openness of the desert, its longevity, the way the monumental landscape forms are made from the erosion of millennia: there are metaphors for self-discovery and expansion here, or for ways the self is wildly irrelevant here, in stark contrast to the ways it is circumscribed by the home, or ideas of family.
Read MoreFor the past few years, I have been writing about mud, both as a material and as a metaphor for mixture, confusion, and messiness (political, personal, and communal). Knowing this, Houston-based artist Devin Kenny writes me that he has just remembered that mud is another term for thickly mixed lean, an addictive psychoactive beverage, also called purple drank, a mixture of codeine cough syrup, Jolly Ranchers, and soda that was first mixed in Houston. It causes euphoria and slowness, a kind of thick, lethargic disassociation. It’s a drink that bears some symbolic relationship to the character of the city itself, I think.
Read MoreLullaby starts with barking dogs. Traffic sounds fade in, with the tinkling bells of bicycles foregrounded over waves of car traffic and horns. We hear sounds of human speech, the shouting and organizing of a day in a busy outdoor space. There are many kinds of interactions happening here, in this sonic city. A familiar lullaby sings itself into the fray, as the traffic sounds and shouts intensify. Bells take over, insist, become rhythmic drums accompanying another kind of song, perhaps for marching. And suddenly we are in a soundscape of ritual tradition, the voices of India merging into one another and leading to a religious hymn sung by an unaccompanied choir. Prayer is called over a loudspeaker.
Read MoreHave you catastrophized about your extremities? Have you imagined your toe getting caught in a door or on a splinter, the nail being split or damaged, the appendage’s smallness always making it vulnerable to being cut or scraped or mangled, pierced or torn apart? Have you played that imagined moment over and over in your mind, sickened and aroused by its strangeness? And if that appendage extended impossibly out along the floor, curling around itself and reaching far in front of its body, would that make this uncomfortable pleasure greater? I.e. can vulnerability be scaled, compared, somehow measured, enjoyed?
Read MoreWe lean on the supposed veracity of the photograph to imagine a person, to "know" something about him, when all we can do is describe what we see through that imperfect lens that conflates vision with understanding. The emotional charge of a photographic image offers us one way of understanding how photographs help construct memory and its emotions. However, if we think of the photograph as an object, we might place it alongside the many other kinds of objects that fill our days and define our relationships. And then the question becomes not about what we see or feel in the image itself, but about how we live alongside an object and what it might say about us.
Read MoreLet us imagine, for a moment, that two geographies that seem to have very little in common, can be linked by physical matter. That, despite their differences in latitude and longitude, in political history and language, that they might be bound (at least for an imagined instant) by something as subtle as the seasonal pattern of rain, as insidious as the unplanned sprawl of urban development, or as seemingly unremarkable as mud.
Read More1. In his 2017 exhibition at Trama, Edgar Calel includes a new body of work, all marked by red mud. The work derives from his recent travels along the border between Paraguay and Brazil. While there, Calel offers his hosts seeds of maize and squash from his home in Comalapa. In return, members of the guaraní kaiowa community in Brazil offer him a gift: standing barefoot in the area's reddish soil, they step on page after page of Calel's notebook, leaving their footprints for him to carry home. He exhibits these pages unaltered; i.e. his exhibition is the remaining evidence (a video, these prints on paper) from an affectionate exchange between a group of people and an artist.
Read MoreDear you:
I am writing to you right now, just as you are reading my words right now, too.
What's the new news? we stutter.
New news is old news now. And now. And now.
Reem says: we always rush toward the future, or we look at the past like it was some special magic thing that we wish we could find again.
Read MoreI am an older sister, and neither of my two siblings grew into the adults that I imagined they would become. This is neither here nor there, neither a good nor a bad thing. It is also not a surprise that my child's mind dreamt a different future for them: one based upon my own imaginings of who they were and what their hopes might be. But when I am caught off guard by the adults those young people became, I am also taken aback by the passage of time and how it makes manifest the subtle shifts and adjustments, the changes we don't see happening until much later, when they are fully upon us. We imagine certain futures, but our actions don't necessarily lead to those same futures. I am sure my brother and sister are also perplexed by my own transformations.
Read MoreSeen from above, a girl spins and twirls, her Converse sneakers beating a rhythm on the concrete pavement below her, her body making an introspective choreography, inside and outside, around, through, and below a plastic hoop. The hoop twirls on her wrist, encircles her waist. It becomes an extension of her body, a cipher for her imagination. It contains her even as she controls its spiraling movements. Filmed in black & white Super-8, Johanna Unzueta's Dinamarca: Mercurio y Hula Hoop (2016) is a joyful and introspective meditation on line and space, on drawing with the body, on containment and elegant solutions to its imposition.
Read MoreA preposition, when used with a noun or pronoun, indicates direction, location, or time. To place alongside. Near, nearby, next to. In regard to, together with, toward. What I am about to write is about relationships between things. About, after, around, owing to. A line has an infinite number of points. The consideration here is how to connect some of them.
Read MoreIn 1854, American botanist John Fisk Allen penned a history of the discovery and cultivation of the Victoria regia to that date. Allen writes, “The Victoria Regia is found distributed north and south of the Amazon, in the bays and still waters of the river and its tributaries, in many of the lakes or ponds of Tropical America, the Berbice River, and various localities of that section of the continent. A plant so remarkable, for the rapidity of its growth, the leaves often expand- ing eight inches in diameter daily; instances under my own observation having occurred wherein they have increased, between sunrise and sunset, half an inch hourly...” When Euro- pean botanists encountered the plant in Brazil in the first years of the 19th century, they were wild about its color and size (up to nine feet in diameter) and its “luxuriant flower, consisting of many hundred petals.”
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