Eternal Rhythms, Part 1
Masha Kouznetsova + Jessie Giles
| Note from curator |
Frequency of Feeling
Here I am, at a loss for words again. Now, frantically searching for the words. It’s between silence and verbal excess. Recall every second, recount each detail. Think it to myself and say it out loud. I can no longer feel it. It’s gone.
Yet, capturing a moment is not the point after all. The artists here are not in it to recreate an experience. Rather, they honor it in their ultimate refusal to become attached to what the experience looked like and was surrounded by. Their practices rely on repetitive action, each gesture moving in meditative rhythm to a sensation of resonance. The work becomes more than a reminder of an evocative moment or an opportunity to relive the instance and instead an expression of the incomprehensible. In our looking perhaps we can become still, pausing to feel.
In the painterly stills of illustrator Masha Kouznetsova (SF), blurred architectural spaces and shifting landscapes pulse as images shift from one to the next in animated gifs. A rhythm of spontaneous movement from the stills transcend complete contemplation of singular moments.
Textiles artist Jessie Giles (ATL), seeing the futility of keeping a memory, tells and retells a series of moments that becomes a rhythm of its own, each recitation slightly altered to both express the current moment and the one progressively seated in the past.
Next week, we will see the work each artist has created in response to one another.
– Chanel Kim
Untitled MASHA KOUZNETSOVA
R.M., museum, stills
R.M., museum, 2016
R.M., ocean, stills
R.M., ocean, 2016
H O W T O K E E P A M E M O R Y, Part 1 JESSIE GILES
Live the thing. While living the thing, use free time to feverishly write about it. This feels right. Feel that. Write every detail. Realize you’ve spent three pages on two hours of the thing. Leave to get in the car with a stranger’s mother. Tour an artist’s studio. Pick up your car with the new front axle. Cry the entire way back but also laugh hard and try not to wreck your newly repaired car. It will break down again in three days anyway. Meet a stranger in a wig. Cry at ritual videos. Wonder how they found you just when you needed them.
Swoon unabashedly at a musician for the first time in years. Sleep on a stranger’s couch.
Meet an older human with one breast who you’re attracted to but also wonder if they’re you in the future. Show them screenshots of your natal chart. Receive their gift. Cry when they call you an artist. Cry when they say your art is for healing. Cry when they tell you to learn to ground and not to lose yourself.
Hug everyone goodbye. Wish you could kiss them. Remember their names, their energies, their smiles.
Get in the car.
Cry.
Laugh harder.
Listen to the same album for four hours driving home. Be sad and relieved you didn’t see that one person. Get home, go to bed.
Spend the next day in the sun. Drink water. Feed yourself snacks. Write the rest of the story. Try to remember the details. It feels dry. Feel that. Get impatient while writing. Wonder how you’ll ever condense it into a tellable story.
Condense it into a tellable story. Know that eternally, this story will represent the entirety of your experience. Mourn the parts that are left out. Tell them you love them and let them go.
Wonder how you could go back to life. Try to find the parts of you that are changed so that you can display them for all to see.
“this happened. I am changed. I am grateful.”
Realize you are the same. You’ll always be the same, but your body is constantly dying and being reborn.
Each morning when you wake remind your body who you are and what’s happened to you.
We can’t forget.
It’s like the notebook but alone.
| all content is property of the artist |