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Post 38: A few things from The Pond Froze Over at Procession Gallery

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One wall of The Pond Froze Over The other day, I dashed into what was a radiant and sensitive show up at Procession Gallery, The Pond Froze Over . I stepped through the space with the slightness and waver of a pencil’s line--just in the way that the space’s atmosphere compelled me to; you could not step boldly through the room for you would drown out the sound of the works--quivering as they were as though (or perhaps they actually were) balancing on a singular spot of softness. Early in my arrival, in the midst of getting my bearings, I happened to turn around and face the outside that I came from, and there happened to be someone out there, on the other side of the street, tagging, with black spray paint, a few objects that were leaning against the brick side wall of a building. This filled me with glee. It fulfilled the strange rareness of witnessing someone mark-make while being surrounded by mark-making in the past tense--unwitnessed marks already having been made. These few thoug...
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Post 37: Sandwich logic

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There are a few objects that I can construe as viewpoints. What each object is, at least in part, is able to be used as a way to see something. This has occurred (this being the turning of an object into a viewpoint) with objects whose unique appearances are built upon, or take place within, structures that feel easily generalizable from each instance of the object’s individual presence. In other words, something can be taken away from the existence of the object, from one specific instance of its existence, while still being true to it. (To generalize is to take from one thing and bring somewhere else.) Still, the question of how true? stays close. How much truth can the generalization retain? And how far does a generalization stray from the object it comes from? The primary example I have of an object with this ability to be generalized (somewhere along the lines this becomes an ability, but it probably more accurately starts at what is a quality of the object that leads to this b...
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Post 36: Getting from an image to a thought

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This post began (but also begins) with this photo: which I took because the sight of what it contains prompted this incomplete thought: [something about when stripes are combined with another thing that very much doesn’t look like stripes.]  It’s interesting to me that what I’m calling the “incomplete thought”--the first thing that happened after my viewing, what immediately took place--is really only a template for a thought. The incomplete thought includes simply what’s present in the photo, plus the words “something about”--the template idea here being that “something about” seems to stand for a thought that hasn’t yet happened. These two words that have very little specific meaning were all that got added to what was already given by the image, which feels merely like a demonstration of what it could be to have a thought about this photo--a thought in full being what would theoretically replace the words “something about” with an actual/specific thing . But I suppose the lack ...
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Post 35: Writing about painting can't be done / writing about some paintings in Wet Diagram

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It’s interesting that writing about painting sets up a relationship between writing and painting. That to write about a painting is to connect this verb (writing) with this object of the preposition (painting). If writing and painting are two separate domains (are they? aren’t they?), then to write about painting is to draw a line from one domain to the other. Like this: At least, that’s what writing feels like. Line drawing. Though, what does a line mean? As this diagram shows, writing about painting (if that was the title of the diagram) situates painting in space. Writing grounds painting--creates what seems to be an accessible path to it--by putting it in connection to another thing (in this case, to itself: to words). There’s a trickiness here--to the pursuit of writing about painting--because in this diagram, in this conception I have of the project that is writing about painting, writing is both the thing painting is in relationship to, and the act that creates the relationsh...
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