HOLD ME CLOSE
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Hold Me Close
I’m remembering How it’s supposed to go Re-membering Those torn Pasts from futures Futures past Supposing it didn’t go Like this Hold me Close |
Each stitch pokes a hole, and sutures one too. Questions also do this. To ask is to rend open, and make new forms. When we ask why, we shake the stability of our constructions, of life itself - as it appears, as it’s inherited, as it’s compelled. Questioning holds the seed of creation.
The works of Hold Me Close spring from the desire to question an unthinkable and unknowable world and self. The presented work - a body of quilts, ceramic sculptures, and a collaborative “newspaper,” - embraces a wide range of disparate parts into familiar and quotidian containers. The gentle fabric whispers, clay remembers gesture and gaze, and Nerve Meter gathers a chorus to tell differently the maladies and ecstasies of today. Visual motifs proliferate to play within and against given ways of being. These paths appear at once all too familiar while still strange, enticing yet insidiously alienating. Suppose it went a little differently. |
Ascent, 2024. Cotton. 60" x 84".
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Grief, 2024. Cotton. 64" x 89".
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Descent, 2024. Cotton. 58" x 93".
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Ascent (Detail).
The Gospel, composed of the quilt triptych - Ascent, Grief, and Descent - reflect on the profound self-deception and destructiveness of modernity as constituted by elements (or myths) such as Innovation, Technology, Development, and Progress. Mining undercuts and climbing is a lonely endeavor. Better closer to the ground, where it remains clear that to win can only be to lose.
The Gospel is also the name for an Israeli program that outsources the indiscriminate production of death (or target generation) to algorithmic methods (or so-called artificial intelligence or machine learning). The program, part of the broader genocidal settler colonial project, is a paradigmatic example of a self-loathing disposition to life, social reproduction, and the diverse forms existence takes writ large.
The Gospel is also the name for an Israeli program that outsources the indiscriminate production of death (or target generation) to algorithmic methods (or so-called artificial intelligence or machine learning). The program, part of the broader genocidal settler colonial project, is a paradigmatic example of a self-loathing disposition to life, social reproduction, and the diverse forms existence takes writ large.
I’ll remember it to you, 2022.
Ceramic. 6" x 6" x 6".
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As I saw them, 2024.
Ceramic. 9” x 6" x 6".
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Sitting, 2024.
Ceramic. 12" x 12" x 14".
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Hold Me Close was shown at the Northampton Center for the Arts Barn Door Gallery in July, 2024 in Northampton, MA. Individual pieces from the show have been exhibited elsewhere in incomplete forms including the A.P.E. Gallery in Northampton, MA and LAVA Gallery in Greenfield, MA. The show was jointly shown with Lynsey Robertson and was the release of the third volume of Nerve Meter, a collaborative newspaper/zine project.
