other mountains, adrift beneath the waves, an exhibition of works by Nadia Huggins and Tessa Mars, on view at the Museum of Contemporary Art Panama (MAC Panama), runs from March 5th to August 16th, 2026. Curated by Yina Jiménez Suriel and Juan Canela.
Sigma 60mm f/2.8 DN ART – Micro Four Thirds Fit Minolta AF 135mm f/2.8 Acquired via mpb
“His work is as much a form of behavior as a product of craft. It is restless, with the discontent of a dog that turns and turns, unable to feel just right about the place it has chosen to lie down. The main place Twombly has chosen since the ’50s is the New York School big painting, in its definitive combination of matter-of-fact touch and cosmic field.
This site defines Twombly as a poet of belatedness. Brilliantly, he makes it a medium for fugitive traces of other lostnesses: Mediterranean aches, Roman poetries. There is wonderful tension between vatic reference and vernacular mark, the ineffable and the crude. Twombly conveys a peculiar state—reminiscent of the poems of C. P. Cavafy—of possessing in mind and heart a territory that his body cannot share, because the body cannot inhabit memory. His body’s gestures toward that zone—itchy, stammering, tender scrawls—deliciously hurt. Meanwhile, he checks a tendency to the precious with bold and practical experiments in picture-making form.”
Size Down, Peter Schjeldahl, ArtForum, September 1994.
I love how it swells into a temple where it is held prisoner, where the god of blame resides. I love slopes & peaks, the secret paths that make me selfish. I love my crooked feet shaped by vanity & work shoes made to outlast belief. The hardness coupling milk it can’t fashion. I love the lips, salt & honeycomb on the tongue. The hair holding off rain & snow. The white moons on my fingernails. I love how everything begs blood into song & prayer inside an egg. A ghost hums through my bones like Pan’s midnight flute shaping internal laws beside a troubled river. I love this body made to weather the storm in the brain, raised out of the deep smell of fish & water hyacinth, out of rapture & the first regret. I love my big hands. I love it clear down to the soft quick motor of each breath, the liver’s ten kinds of desire & the kidney’s lust for sugar. This skin, this sac of dung & joy, this spleen floating like a compass needle inside nighttime, always divining West Africa’s dusty horizon. I love the birthmark posed like a fighting cock on my right shoulder blade. I love this body, this solo & ragtime jubilee behind the left nipple, because I know I was born to wear out at least one hundred angels.
“I remain hopeful partly as defiance. But what you’re addressing is narrative itself. Most stories are: Something goes wrong, and then we have to address it. When nothing goes wrong, there’s no story. But also, a lot of what’s right are stories of incremental change.
The wonder and horror for climate is that the great majority of people on Earth support climate action. The obstacles are not technological. They’re political.“
The light retreats and is generous again. No you to speak of, anywhere—neither in vicinity nor distance,
so I look at the blue water, the snowy egret, the lace of its feathers shaking in the wind, the lake—no, I am lying.
There are no egrets here, no water. Most of the time, my mind gnaws on such ridiculous fictions.
My phone notes littered with lines like Beauty will not save you. Or: mouthwash, yogurt, cilantro.
A hummingbird zips past me, its luminescent plumage disturbing my vision like a tiny dorsal fin.
But what I want does not appear. Instead, I find the redwoods and pines, figs that have fallen and burst open on the pavement,
announcing that sickly sweet smell, the sweetness of grief, my prayer for what is gone.
You are so dramatic, I say to the reflection on my phone, then order the collected novels of Jean Rhys.
She, too, was humiliated by her body, that it wanted such stupid, simple things: food and cherry wine, to touch someone.
On my daily walk, I steal Meyer lemons from my neighbors’ yard, a small pomegranate. Instead of eating them,
I observe their casual rot on the kitchen counter, this theatre of good things turning into something else.
Wilt thou go with me sweet maid Say maiden wilt thou go with me Through the valley-depths of shade, Of night and dark obscurity, Where the path has lost its way Where the sun forgets the day Where there’s nor life nor light to see Sweet maiden, wilt thou go with me?
2
Where stones will turn to flooding streams Where plains will rise like ocean waves Where life will fade like visioned dreams And mountains darken into caves Say maiden wilt thou go with me Through this sad non-identity Where parents live and are forgot And sisters live and know us not?
3
Say maiden wilt thou go with me In this strange death of life to be To live in death and be the same Without this life, or home, or name At once to be, and not to be That was, and is not—yet to see Things pass like shadows—and the sky Above, below, around us lie?
4
The land of shadows wilt thou trace And look—nor know each other’s face, The present mixed with reasons gone And past, and present all as one. Say, maiden can thy life be led To join the living to the dead? Then trace thy footsteps on with me We’re wed to one eternity.
