ALL EXITS
solo show at Vox Populi Gallery from March 3 - April 16, 2023
Every star is a portal
Every anus is true
Every hand is a fist
I’m going into you
Every anus is true
Every hand is a fist
I’m going into you
Every hole is a window
Every tongue is a door
Everything anticipating
I’m coming back for more
Every tongue is a door
Everything anticipating
I’m coming back for more
Every lock is a promise
Every key is one too
Every moment is an exit
And I’m going through
Every key is one too
Every moment is an exit
And I’m going through
A portrait of all the colors of darkness. 5 days of no sleep pulled tight over the skull, strings of twilit naps beaded loose with poems in between, science fiction nightmares, running into the arms of sleep away from work. Sometimes sleep is the only strike afforded. Not awake or asleep, down the hall, in the back of the world, where do you go when there’s no name for it? Look out the windows painted with the curtains pulled back slipping into dreams. Our night mind is a stage – in which there is one star. How terrifying! There are countless stars if only we could see. Lie down, look up, and rest. Let me sing you a song of wet sidewalks and passing street lamps, of subconscious highway drives and tossed-off bedroom clothes. All our sleepless nights are connected. To refuse sleep is to refuse death, surrender, and be embraced by the night and be swaddled. Don’t be afraid, let the lights go blurry in your eyes, soft to slumber with a lullaby and midnight kiss.
I have an inherited fear of the dark. My father and his father were both afraid of the dark. They both grew up in remote suburbs. Who knew what lay outside of the fringes of the dim streetlights? I also have in/hypersomnia and depression from my father’s mother. She was never afraid of the dark. She remembered when electricity came to her town of less than 100, and the day it was installed in her family’s farmhouse. The bulb was steady, harsh, and thrilling, cutting into her isolated world as the only child for miles. All her life she yearned for that light but retreated firmly to her place in the dark. Her keen country eyes could see shapes and colors and creatures in the darkness that others could not. The promise of the darkness, as well as the threat. Complexities that I have spent my life trying to understand, pulled back and forth between the two realms of light and dark, night and day.
ALL EXITS includes ladders to the sky, doors to nowhere, paintings of windows into another world, highway lullabies, and dirty laundry night lights. The run of the show also contained the release of some writing, and a tape. Light Sleep: poems written in between naps and ALL EXITS: a collection of short stories.
Navigate below to see images of ALL EXITS
