Waiting room for real lifecame into being through a series of accidents, things i needed to find a way to understand.
If I didn’t know any better, I’d explain in lightness: the window which is a place for perching, condolences, and an imagined lover’s silence is the muddy relief of a painting that is mine. I could comfortably call personal and material failure a “lens” through which I make work, but it doesn’t feel like enough. I don’t always know how to make the words about painting, despite carrying the affective citations, collections, and fixations around the medium everywhere I go. This habit I have because of seeking redress for my surroundings is a habit that is extremely resistant.
I know about waiting. I know my hand and I can think right through it. I know what it’s like to stand still remembering walking with light acting inside of you, what it’s like when you walk as light removes itself from you, and the third thing I know about quietly is what it’s like to sway clumsily and remember nothing except these windows to other places, how I came came to look them, hearing stories rustle around me, watching the abnormal moon. If part of painting is a tension between ambiguity and verbal refinement, I’ll offer some things about what I am now: the facts of my own rage, personal drifting, and sometimes comical embarrassment and give the appearance of these things the agency of taking on form.
I was waiting to stop feeling dizzy on some train platform. I was waiting next to my body to feel some belonging. I was waiting where life ascended through beeping. Drawing a house that could last a little bit longer.
Teaching a child who asked me “do you practice stuff a lot?” and thinking about how to answer. “Practicing is starting over a lot.” Watching two people look at each other after I stuttered and making meaning out of it. Sitting in the grass with nothing to do but think about moving on. Wild bugs, roots, wrinkled leaves.
It’s a roof over the air stillness where I’m picking at the wallpaper of what was once stable. It’s birdsong and absolute blue.
I am going to be beautiful glitches collecting beyond what the archivist does,
a tiny light-washed photograph. Bent in the landfills or incinerated.
Painting where the glass and metals go.
mfa thesis show - queens college - april 2024
