Shared Practices Exhibition

 

New York City Jewellery Week / November 18-24 / Pratt Institute, Steuben Gallery

 

Curated by: interdisciplinary artist Ayesha Sureya, who feels that adornment is a possibility for psycho-magic states, and artist Lili Murphy-Johnson, whose work questions value, labour and purpose.

Artists: Lydia Hartshorn, Eve Lam, Farvash, Joshua Woolford, Mairi Millar, Margo Misiak-Orlovic, Banita Mistry, Sylvester Eulalee Mair, Leo Costelloe, Viktoria Gorny, Zoe Clark, Bette Nunneley, Roanne Sanchez-Watts, Lili Murphy-Johnson, Ayesha Sureya.

Hosted by: Fold(s) Community, Pratt Institute, New York City Jewellery Week.

      

 

I immerse myself in materiality. My outline finally gives in. Ruptures-erupts. I dissolve, welcoming the irreversibility of this movement. Who was I anyway?

All-fours feels right. Falling through the strata face-first feels true. Sink. Deeper. Smells good. So good. Caringly circulating. Offering instant release.

 

I zoom in to bear witness to my self-administered deconstruction. The song of my breath is heavy and dense. It travels through space. It is space. I am space as I travel through space. I am song as I vibrate myself [in to] perpetuity, blowing up all pretence to autonomy.

Ecstatically absorbing, looping in and out, I relax as the mind of material activates itself inside my body. Things happen. Things are called [in to] being.

 

As the muddy rain waters enter my bloodstream, nameless creatures work their way across my chest, cheerfully dragging the record of time [whose time?,] dragging the me which was always there, out there, I jump into the river. I have always been the river.

Damp. Hard. Reverberating.

 

I immerse myself in materiality, hungry. I leak further [out] of my shimmering, liquid bounds, beyond the numb familiarity of the grid. On high alert, I have never felt more at peace. [A gambler] trembling with quiet confidence, I always win. I touch. My fingertips explore the endlessness of possible solutions, each inescapably being the right one. Over and over. The exactness of not-knowing.

I stick my hand elbow-deep into the fire, into the ash, into the rock. I meticulously cobble my dreams in salt, stagger and crow verse.

 

What is coming is unknown and exciting. Electrifying, exhilarating. Life never complete, discrete, completed. A spongy being forever caught mid-turn. A patient breath incessant in its flow.

 

I am cracking all over and the cracks are finally making sense. Weeping and relieved, I listen as my surface breaks up and retches the bubbling, murmuring songs of the river, the sensuous crooning of the tool. I exhale wind. I perspire dust. I soak up your hairline.

I shatter, longing for that life which embraces everything. Yearning for that life which champions mutant love, I soar, I flock, I writhe. Curious and excited, endearingly dismissible, I have so much to give I have no choice but burst. Aching to be absorbed I volunteer to step into the fire.

 

Excited, incited, awakened, aroused. Safely nested in the unknown. I slowly become a running joke. Run. Wait. Inhale. Ingest. In-corporate. Lick. Dribble. Dab.

Listen.

I spill over my edges, across the folds. So gentle. I celebrate that nothing ever anywhere [is] the way they told me. Rowdily. In-real-time, in front of my eyes, along my spine, the connection is established and everything falls into place.

 

I lose myself [in—to] materiality. Feral through and through, contorted on the ledge ready to plunge, daydreaming tornados, I blindly run into the eye, catching the swirling dust into my gaping-greedy, poetic-pathetic fallacy of a mouth.

As I interact with the creature-things we become entangled. Our engorged-entropic bastard materiality explodes and reimagines itself. We become one. We become all.

 

I fall deep down into the fire screeching with joy. I traverse, transplant, transgress my surface, my core, my burning smoking outlines yearning to find my tribe-- with the rock, the mist [over the Thames as observed from the Battersea bridge on a winter morning,] the hammer, the tiny yellow flower, the crippled and grotesque South Kensington station pigeon, the squeaky, whiny mud under my feet on a park afternoon [round and round.]

To be lovingly enfolded.

Shifting and entangled, new brings itself into being. Unstable, excited, breathing the same breath, we groan and hatch together.