Imagination, too, is old habit

Imagination, too, is old habit, assiduously maintained despite consequences.

And I accept the presence of dances invisible to me.

I racked up habitual sins. I desired, desire

Grand Tour: Poems, Elisa Gonzalez


AG2023_1078278a
Studio view (122123) including Untitled (Field Guide; “what’s not found at once, but lies within something of another nature”) i and iii.

AG2024IMG_20221127_161716_HDRa or always looked like agony to me

AG2024IMG_20221127_161716_HDRa
Untitled, 2022

People talk of “good” or “peaceful” deaths as if they’ve seen one, but it’s always looked like agony to me, despite the morphine. “

The Dream Won’t Come True, Kathy Fagan


“The flatness I have in mind is also a form of rejoinder to a calamitous present. It, too, short-circuits the expectation that subjects will authenticate themselves through confession or breakdown, that they will call forth hidden but unfeigned intensities of feeling through their own meticulous artistry. Crucially, although a far cry from the honnêteté lofted by the crosscurrents of courtly and early commercial society, it retains what Pascal identified as an intimacy with judgement. Materializing in scenes and histories of violence, it ultimately sidesteps or leapfrogs an understanding of such contexts as traumatic, to land on the simple verdict that they are wrong. Without saying that this is a more radical approach to a political poetics, I would nonetheless suggest that it is a crucial and overlooked style of critique. In the us in particular, such flatness confronts a public culture that has long appealed to unexamined and unmanaged feeling to supercharge repressive programmes and paranoias.”

[…]

” A recessive poetics doesn’t have to be radical: it might be timid, callous or boring. As Eisen-Martin’s work suggests, because flatness is embedded in a sense of the present as not only cruel but monotonous, it has definitively seceded from more exuberant or animated forms of expression; if it didn’t, it would not be flatness but melancholy. One might accuse it, then, as one might accuse these poets, of refusing or being unable to present a model of social life that is ecstatic, and through which human life might finally uncover the full range of its capacities for experience. But flatness is also, or might be, an ethical withdrawal from the impulse to dictate how any other person should encounter themselves. There is no cult of flatness, though there has long been a cult of lyric agitation; and since the latter is in no danger of dissolving, perhaps it might be good to have some alternatives to it.”

Notes on Tone, Anahid Nersessian, New Left Review 142

Kentridge, The Old Gods Have Retired

William Kentridge, The Old Gods Have Retired, 2022

Photogravure, sugarlift aquatint, direct gravure, drypoint and chine collé with found ledger encyclopedia paper and various other papers with handpainting on Hahnemühle Natural, White, 300gsm. 63 4/5 × 78 7/10 in | 162 × 200 cm. Edition of 20.

Published by Jillian Ross Print and David Krut Projects. Collaborating Master Printer: Jillian Ross.

Posted in art

A landscape longed for: The garden as disturbance

We are thrilled to announce our forthcoming exhibition “A landscape longed for: The garden as disturbance” curated by Laura Novoa and Adler Guerrier. The exhibition, which opens to the public on Friday, March 1 at 5pm, features work by 15 artists, each of whom explores the motif of the garden in its relation to the cultivation and expression of beauty and knowledge.

Each of the participating artists, including Laura Castro, Carolina Casusol, Sandi Haber Fifield, David Hartt, Jim Hodges, Mark Fleuridor, Candice Lin, Cathy Lu, Lee Mary Manning, Ana Mendieta, Reginald O’Neal, Ebony Patterson, Ema Ri, Onajide Shabaka and Kandis Williams, consider the intricacies of the garden as a metaphor for the larger world, using it as a framework to consider cultural, social, political, geographical, and historical issues.

“A landscape longed for: The garden as disturbance” builds on the exhibit’s first iteration, showcased at Locust Projects in Miami in 2021. There, works were displayed with dialogues addressing notions of fragility, remembrance, ornamentation, beauty, and affective traces in the landscape. At CEAM, the show’s themes extend to ecological interdependence, homage, reverence, refuge, renewal, and time emphatically spent on the creation and nourishment of our inner lives.

Laura Novoa is a curator and arts administrator based in Miami, FL, where she works as Assistant Director of Programs and Community Engagement at the Bakehouse Art Complex. She has curated exhibitions for the Miami Design District, Locust Projects, Oolite Arts, and YoungArts, among others. Adler Guerrier is an artist based in Miami who has presented his works in exhibitions at the Samuel P. Harn Museum of Art, Orlando Museum of Art, Pérez Art Museum Miami, NSU Art Museum Fort Lauderdale, and CEAM.