Area Of Intrigue

Many of the first naked bodies I saw were adult, varied in fitness and age. Luck and interest brought me to a public high school where we drew from life. Life drawing is a record of concentration that flattens judgement and connects eye to hand, hand to subject. At the same time, live models – as opposed to bowls of apples – make their vulnerability known with their tremors, heartbeats and blinking. For myself and my teenage classmates, these bodies awakened our sensitivities without activating our anxieties. Drawing was an uninstructed period of observation, a peaceful break in the alarm…

Of the multiple ways that I relate to the weather, one way that has been prominent recently has been thinking with and relating to the weather as a locator and a temporality that reflects the time I am present in. The external atmospheric conditions are a reminder to place and ground myself as I navigate the portal that asks me— where are you? The weather situates me spatially, structurally, and intimately in the different geographies that I have lived in, particularly in South Africa and Botswana over the last four years. We report the weather to each other every day…

After Morning Sun Garden, Aracha Cholitgul, nap gallery 1. Welcome! Please wipe your feet and collect the dirt that may have fallen off the shoes of you and others: chew, crunch, and/or suck. How does the collective detritus of a sole taste? Spit, swallow, or tuck behind a molar for a later reminder of the visit, whatever kind of mouth you are. 1 2. Mind the entranceway: it transforms. You may find yourself, suddenly, with a tail, with vertical slitted pupils, with a fluid sense of the walls, bounds, and confines that you knew before. Embrace, arch the back and inhabit your new position…

“Our minds have been corrupted in proportion as the arts and sciences have improved … the evils resulting from our vain curiosity are as old as the world.” — Jean Jacques Rousseau I recently came across an old Huffington Post article (done in that Buzzfeed list style that was so popular for pop-culture blogs in the 2010s) titled “9 Sci-Fi Inventions We Wish Were Real.” Pop culture lists like this about science fiction are common, usually detailing the inventions science fiction has predicted/invented. This particular Huffington Post list was of not-yet-existent inventions which “we” yearn for, and it bizarrely included the “nursery” from Ray Bradbury’s great short sci-fi…

How to explain: For everything that exists, there is an unexisting. For everything that matters to me, there is the other matter, an un-story told in calculations regarding matter. Super symmetry of the Standard Model. These ringed fingers pursue individual tasks under the guise of hand. I wake up in the middle of a decision: work at the diagram or work at the window. Touch and orientation. I wear jeans and a bra for now. Abundant particularity of oak accompanies my note taking. Juice from a cantaloupe so alive it cites a future rot. Somewhere in the central section of…

n a late summer afternoon, while toiling in the garden of a mainline estate, my coworker Jarrod shared a prophetic dream of playing basketball and failing to make the winning shot. Though his dream was from the previous night, he mentioned it was a recurring one. Jarrod, a former Big Ten basketball star, claimed he hadn’t reached his full potential because he didn’t make it to the NBA. Now, in his early forties, he was in his fifteenth season as a landscaper. A muscular and unexpectedly meek Black man from a religious family, Jarrod was raised by a domineering father…

In Gregg Bordowitz’s Fast Trip Long Drop (1993), the artist poses as a talk show guest. Bags under his eyes. Sweaty. Full, dark hair. Sits in a dim blue polo cutting at his biceps. In front of a rich blue curtain.  Talk show host palms his hands together: “How long since you received your diagnosis of AIDS?” Bordowitz begins: “I’m sick and I don’t want a cure. I like my illness. It’s just as much a part of me as any other of my characteristics. I identify…-” Host: “Ok.” Bordowitz: “…with my illness.” Another afternoon spent chatting with the hospital’s hold track…

Everything is what it is because of its relationship to everything else. — So & Pinar Sinopoulos-Lloyd (Queer Nature) Paper folds, creases, tears, and crinkles. It holds the vestige of notes passed to one another or journal entries of dreams and nightmares. It facilitates exchanges of currency, and other types of social contracts that become real when written down, and perhaps, letters to a lover. In many ways, paper is an empath; impressionable, and observant. It’s a vessel that lives, dies, and becomes reborn through decomposition. Paper “bridges the material and immaterial” as Hong Hong describes. Papermaking, since the Han Dynasty in 206-220…

Three years after its Golden Lion win at the 2019 Venice Biennale, Sun & Sea arrived in London. The Lithuanian performance on climate change was brought to the British capital as a collaboration between We Are Lewisham Borough of Culture 2022, London’s International Festival of Theatre (LIFT) 2022, and the Serpentine Gallery’s Back to Earth programme on the climate emergency.  This multitude of producers from all corners of the London cultural sphere begged the question: “what exactly is it?”, as many people enquired when I mentioned my summer evening outing. In each context, it became a different art form. Was it a public community event for Lewisham…

I began to adopt the practice of concealing my chronic pain1 almost immediately after it began over 13 years ago. I have set rules for myself: not to vocalize my pain, not to let people see it on my face or in my body language. Though I am slowly growing more comfortable disclosing the fact of its existence, I continue to contain my sensations and the realities of my embodiment. I fear that expressing my pain will make people uncomfortable. I fear that it may invite expressions of pity, or admiration for my resilience. Even worse, I fear unsolicited advice and suspicions…