One of six

the veil

the body bare to the gaze — and altered by it

In both inheritances I keep meeting the same thing: what does not get revealed, and what crosses the line when it does. These works gather around the gaze itself — the looked-at body, the looking body, and the apparatus the West built to teach the body to be seen: the figure study, Vitruvian measure, the motion study, the medical plate. To look is already to alter; the body you see is never the body that was before the looking, the way the electron is never the electron we see. Some of these works hide in order to reveal, running the displaced body through the language of censorship; some slow the looking until what the seeing has always been becomes legible. The fear of being seen and the longing to be seen turn out to be the same thing.

the white flag

a seven-foot silk flag of figures in medallions; one looks back through binoculars, the only face, covered by its own looking; in the open air the wind eventually takes it, and the surrender is performed by the elements.

the measure of all things

the measure of all things

Vitruvian Man come apart: the white flag at the center, seven of its bodies drawn onto monitors and placed back into the wind and water that undo them. None can be the measure of anything.

Muybridge’s motion studies pixelated to the threshold of dissolution; the figure emerges from the field of particles as you attend to it; below the limen, where most looking actually happens.

$situs solitus$

situs solitus

the body’s culturally hidden parts run through pixelation and Pantone codes; not a redaction but a flower bed, each part returned to its proper place, on the same side as tenderness.

canvases that name a body part but refuse to depict it, so you find it in your own body before it has had to be broken into attention; at the center, a box fills with visitors’ written confessions.

the fear of giving ourselves away in public: the armor that slips, the queer feeling glimpsed, the second too long — an omission that is also a life-changing event.

the take away

a pedestal, a water-projected silk, and a deck of cards you are invited to handle: a story found only if you give away the need to solve it; the companion to the giveaway.

anonymous figure studies projected onto living torsos as temporary skin; on a breathing chest, the dead rise and fall with the borrowed breath. Made in the pandemic, by telephone.

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