Distance
2020- in progress (to be posted mid-June, 2020.) Transformation of my grandmother's dress into a kite. Stills below. In progress.
Kite and earth. Moon, Earth. Umbilical attachment to Other.
This work comes to be about attachment to Other things. Self, personhood, a sister. Perhaps an expectation. It is about destruction of an object in order to give it new form. A cable-line of nourishment, protection, and negotiation, in a place of change and loss. A would-be ocean; actually, the river I would have been baptized in, weather permitting, in the place I spent childhood summers searching for fossilized sharks’ teeth, like the dresses, another ancient record of a life passed. A tool, a relic.
This work, then, is linear with a suggestion of the cyclical; moving from wearing and wind, on a shore, to textile-in transformation, to a kite, to loss. A motion forward from something delicate, and worn, fragile and full of history, to an un-making, torn away, reassembled, into something with flight. This something, the kite, does not just exist, but once again requires negotiation, through planes of movement and stillness, and crashing forward, to ascend. In my own memory, kites are always flying, but my practical and forgettable experience reminds me otherwise. It’s a push--pull- shimmy upward, linear communication of give and take. The kite, a newly heavenly body learns to ask of its master; the flyer listens with their hands to these asks, negotiations, reminds it of gravity, climbing through panes of geothermal movement. Ground and sky; umbilical tether. To mark the progress more and more of the dress is given. Torn at the hem. This is an action I’d seen for years in movies-- princesses, or women-as-heroines, mostly. Hems torn out as slings, tourniquets, to save princes, and without hesitation-- but-- didn’t she need that hem, to uphold the modest upheld by those she saved? Hers always come back, regenerates somehow. Mine never did. And modern clothes don’t tear like that anyway. Delicate, tearable, disposable coverage; cover yourself unless I need that fabric more. This dress tears, and easily; the silk is cetenerial. So-- upward, it is sent, as the thing cared for asks for more and more until-- it has it all, and I know it must leave, and I release it to the wind that I would give anything to follow.
Care-taking as negotiation, and then-- loss. Devastating, but necessary, and consensual. Giving.
In conversation with Laundry and Ascent.
This work comes to be about attachment to Other things. Self, personhood, a sister. Perhaps an expectation. It is about destruction of an object in order to give it new form. A cable-line of nourishment, protection, and negotiation, in a place of change and loss. A would-be ocean; actually, the river I would have been baptized in, weather permitting, in the place I spent childhood summers searching for fossilized sharks’ teeth, like the dresses, another ancient record of a life passed. A tool, a relic.
This work, then, is linear with a suggestion of the cyclical; moving from wearing and wind, on a shore, to textile-in transformation, to a kite, to loss. A motion forward from something delicate, and worn, fragile and full of history, to an un-making, torn away, reassembled, into something with flight. This something, the kite, does not just exist, but once again requires negotiation, through planes of movement and stillness, and crashing forward, to ascend. In my own memory, kites are always flying, but my practical and forgettable experience reminds me otherwise. It’s a push--pull- shimmy upward, linear communication of give and take. The kite, a newly heavenly body learns to ask of its master; the flyer listens with their hands to these asks, negotiations, reminds it of gravity, climbing through panes of geothermal movement. Ground and sky; umbilical tether. To mark the progress more and more of the dress is given. Torn at the hem. This is an action I’d seen for years in movies-- princesses, or women-as-heroines, mostly. Hems torn out as slings, tourniquets, to save princes, and without hesitation-- but-- didn’t she need that hem, to uphold the modest upheld by those she saved? Hers always come back, regenerates somehow. Mine never did. And modern clothes don’t tear like that anyway. Delicate, tearable, disposable coverage; cover yourself unless I need that fabric more. This dress tears, and easily; the silk is cetenerial. So-- upward, it is sent, as the thing cared for asks for more and more until-- it has it all, and I know it must leave, and I release it to the wind that I would give anything to follow.
Care-taking as negotiation, and then-- loss. Devastating, but necessary, and consensual. Giving.
In conversation with Laundry and Ascent.
Distance, as installed at the Burrow Gallery, run by Tactile Movement Collective, in Brooklyn, NY. Video (16mm) progressed through projector forward by peddling treadle sewing machine used in performances to stitch.
MVI_8158.MOVMVI_8119.MOVUpload Kite 2021.movProjected content, on loop.
Distance conversation.mp4Artist discussion of Distance, for the Burrow Gallery, 2021.