an arrow of all fletch
2024

“The left-wing feathers were for R-handed scribes, as those feathers curved away from the sight line and over the hand. Scribes opted to change nib angles - cut with a penknife - rather than the angles at which they held their pens, and so contorting their hands and depleting them…The quill’s notched point, like an arrow’s, the quill itself an arrow of all fletch.”

-Joshua Cohen,  Attention

“What have I in common with Jews? I have hardly anything in common with myself.”

-Kafka

Now, you find yourself evaluating every moment for its efficacy. You’re anxious and distracted. But you have a routine of acknowledging authority. Touching it at the threshold: Re-membering powers that be. Card slipped inside. You follow its instructions. You’re punching in. You’re on the clock. It is time to attend.

I had some thoughts about moods of attention and distraction: The way my body attended differently to linguistic and material expressions. How this all is tied to difficulties with communication, and how these concerns might be made apt for a Jewish audience. My selection as Blanksteen Artist-in-Residence was announced on October 6th, 2023. On that day, I was excited to spend the upcoming months exploring these aesthetic concerns. Soon these would be concealed by other anxieties.

A focus on attention was subsumed by an interest in legibility. Here, words bear meaning like arms to varying degrees. All the text in this show is lifted and re-presented: Some clear (though many meanings are still blurry to me), and some are entirely opaque: sealed within the work. There is a book made of bronze. It contains contributions from the Blanksteen cohort, and the contents of all the contributions -are far as I know- have not yet been revealed. Welded shut, it will stay on the shelves in the reading room upstairs. I am glad that the Slifka Center has agreed to hold space for the unknown.

This work was made possible with help from Anny Chen, JC Christy, Norwood Viviano, Paul Whittenbraker, Caroline Bell, Destin Nordyke, Aimi Hettinger, Cecilia Lopez Nieves, Irlanda Beltran, Claire West, Flora Ranis, Caleb Tacoma, and many others.

Cheltenham Sticks
Birch, oak, acacia, brass, paper mache, pencil shavings, straw, flour, rabbit feed, bird feed, meal replacement powder, aspartame, sand, sticks, text, envelope, golf ball, epoxy resin, epoxy clay, wax

Untitled Homage to Warrior Reliquary (Quit your tents.)
Bronze, leather, to do list, baton, truck bed liner, plywood, polystyrene, painted steel, sand

Double Effigy
Paper mache, plaster, wood, steel, two novelty size pencils with George Oppen’s Of Being Numerous

Double Shell Consecration
Plywood, plaster, oak, truck bed liner. two box turtle shells with perforated Nalgenes containing consecrations & printed material, wing nuts, pre-stamped postcards addressed to Rosa DeLauro with Theodor Adorno’s Minima Moralia

PC:S (Lead Melakhot)
PC:M (The Featherduster)
PC:T (Arrow of all Fletch)
PC:W (Deficit Creed)
PC:Th (Aspartame Achilles)
PC:F (A Feather Thrown into a Canyon)
Six modified Acroprint 150s, olive wood, bronze,  videos with Richard Serra’s Hand Catching Lead, Normon Solomon’s The Talmud: A Selection, onyx, acrylic, Italo Calvino’s If on a Winter’s Night a Traveler..., Louise Glück’s The Triumph of Achilles, aspartame, Abraham Joshua Heschel’s The Sabbath, various other appropriated texts and footage

Untitled Tome 
Cast and welded bronze, carbon felt, undisclosed contributions.
Permanent installation.