“But what about the early stages of recognizing that these principles exist in the world, in and out of view, like a latticed network? Bronson Smillie seems to enact this in his solo exhibition Almost Begin: the stage where crude, exploratory creation and the imminent graduation into a more developed thinking meet and grapple with one another. The verb ‘enact’ is key here, as he possesses an aptitude for refinement and the decipherment of nuance, which makes what appears naive in his work a deliberate choice. The child-like objects and motifs—letter blocks, encyclopedias “de la jeunesse”, line drawings of a house—are present to convey a mind in the midst of crucial development, like a kid on the brink of adulthood. But the movement towards greater thinking is the main point. The works suggest they are the products of a young, forming mind actively parsing and processing the underlying abstract concepts that make up what we sense and know. The books, for instance, are methodically combined to form modular grids or a straight, curving line, all laden with the geometric: right, scalene and obtuse triangles, the occasional tiny cylinder. The phrase ‘Troubles Making’, spelt out of blocks, repeats each letter like the recognition of what constitutes rhythm; the build up of one note moving into another, resulting in the kind of change that creates meaning (a word, a song). The drawings, with their snaking curves, adjacent dots, and evocative symbols, suggest something musical, traveling on the page like the stops and starts of a dance. And note the phrases made of address book letters on the side—My First Low, Best Flop, Act Below—diminutive, like a whispered vocalization. “Peinture-poesie”, or painting-poetry, was the nomenclature Joan Miró used for his “dream” paintings of 1924-27, works that contained a sparse scattering of abstract symbols and the occasional word or phrase; Bronson’s drawings share this evocation. They also evoke poetry written in more complex forms, like the villanelle or sestina, which find meaning and flow even as language is constrained by the austerity of a certain formality. These last few points have less to do with enactment than with evidence of Bronson’s artistic maturity, of his ability to perform something that he has already transcended with the subtle tenderness typical of his work. If things are becoming more raw, more simplified, it’s more a gesture of moving backward towards a less cluttered (and ideally purer) state; and moving backward can happen at the same time as moving forward.”

Excerpt from exhibition text for “Almost Begin” at Afternoon Projects (Vancouver), 2023

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“This not-done-ness, paired with the paintings’ visual parallels to both colourfield and graffiti-marked walls, made me recall The Subconscious Art of Graffiti Removal (2001), a semi-ironic documentary on the inadvertent artistic genius of graffiti removers. The narrator notes that the “graffiti removers […] do not set out to create public art, but rather to uphold anti-graffiti laws and deter civil disobedience.” The results are nonetheless evocative of modern painting movements like abstract expressionism, suprematism, and even colourfield. While the film makes this observation both sincerely and in jest, I appreciated the suggestion that those who destroy works of graffiti (or do a lawful service, depending on who’s talking) are unconsciously creating something beautiful, even sublime, through their state-funded acts of counter-defacement. The narrator also posits that the artistry of these graffiti removals is a result of “repressed artistic desire.” This could be the case, but it mostly made me think about the inviolable power of desire, and how it can exist even when its subject seems impossible to attain. Some writers have argued, for example, that Jenine Marsh’s art implies a certain hope for a different, better world, but I don’t know if that’s explicitly true. What it does contain is the necessary spirit of a desire free from the expectation of fulfilment.”

Excerpt from review of “no order” at Joe Project (Montreal) for C Magazine Issue 155, 2023

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“Kroll thus avoids what poet and writer John Ashbery describes as the “horror” of the artist who “treats art as though it were raw material for a factory that produces a commodity called understanding.” Ashbery’s point, besides criticizing art too shallow to require any searching, is that this “commodity” (or lone idea, in this context) is merely a fragment of the whole: it may lead to what ostensibly could be understanding, but is actually just a narrow scope of a wider purview. Some art that takes time to discern isn’t necessarily abstruse either, since the protracted awareness comes from how much the work holds—the “reality of the ensemble,” as Ashbery calls it—and how small our assumed knowledge is in the face of so much. Kroll’s work, intrinsically equivocal, supports what I believe to be an argument for confusion, even frustration, when interacting with certain art, which exposes our cognitive limitations. Implicit is a request for rumination and humility.”

Excerpt from review of “Fireflies” at Eli Kerr (Montreal) for Peripheral Review, 2023

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I’ve been reading a book about Philip Guston lately. I like finding out when great artists are riveted, almost to the point of worry, by other artists. For Guston, it was Rembrandt. His later period in particular: this is when the Dutch painter saw contours as optional, sometimes completely forgoing the edges that distinguished subject from space. There was something about this that made Guston feel Rembrandt’s portraits were “not a painting, but a real person”, as they had the rare ability to bypass what Guston called “the plane of art”. Rembrandt did this with subtlety and grace. To me, Max Keene’s work achieves something similar. But what it gives way to is not something material, like a person, but more vague and abstract: the deportment of memory.

The paintings in Back of House contain skilful renderings of figurative forms: a shoe print, ancient statues, wrenches, bota bags, a running figure, to name a few. It’s a playful range that seems more like a random selection from the mind’s archive of encountered images: an ordinary object, a moment in time. But what transcends Guston’s “plane of art” has more to do with Keene’s style, which seems to want to capture the nature of the unconscious realm itself: a single dilating room where images flow into and against one another. Keene’s chosen tool, the airbrush, is a helpful assist: its hazy articulation of forms, in subdued and feathery palettes, fade from one to the next without any convincing edge. Though figures are identifiable, the paintings feel closer to abstract, as the forms, like memories, are layered or as one with each other or the space around them. Some artists that include the unconscious in their work may tend toward the provocative or even absurd. Keene’s paintings are more a quiet offering of memory’s odd conflations, and a modest pictorial attempt at both gathering and parsing these elements while respecting the irreducible nature of unconsciousness. Like Rembrandt, Keene channels subtlety and grace.

Back to Philip Guston. He also believed that “frustration is one of the great things in art”, while “satisfaction is nothing”. Keene’s work may challenge the reasoned mind, which prefers its edges defined. But unlike art that satisfies, “to our increasing boredom” (Guston), another kind of art–elusive yet pervasive, vague yet sensical–is what actually lingers, because it cannot be pinned down. Its polyvalence keeps it in a state of becoming. Keene himself told me: “The confusing elements are necessary; it has to be that way to get the feeling.” He was talking about his work, but the same could be said about memory. What resists explanation nevertheless gives rise to affect: both art, and memory’s, intended audience.

Exhibition text for “Back of House” at Pangée (Montreal), 2023

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In his show “Tempo 85” (2022) at Montreal’s Espace Maurice, Bronson Smillie takes apart a player piano, forming evocative new assemblages with its repurposed parts and accessories. In Roll Rubbing #1–4 (these—and all—works 2022), wooden piano keys become shelves for embossed photo mounts; in The Skeleton, more piano keys and washers form a sculptural collage on a wall-resting keybed; and for Keys, piano roll boxes are mounted, player height, in the shape of its title. What’s significant is that Smillie’s artistic intervention keeps the referent instrument intact, a gesture that signifies an observable reverence for the object’s previous life. When he does intervene, traces of his own oeuvre naturally appear: the use of paper pulp and repetition as an extension of his printmaking background; era-specific objects, like photo mounts and a wooden letterpress, that have lost functional relevance but still possess aesthetic merit. Where he appears, so does his signature touch—one that is considerate and tender. Considerate in how traces of previous owners, their marks and notations, are left on scrolls or boxes. And tender like his intervention, which is less a dismantling than a delicate adjustment.

Smillie’s consideration for the objects makes me want to exchange the word repurposing for translation, after Walter Benjamin. In “The Task of the Translator,” Benjamin explains that translation “does not cover the original, does not block its light, but allows the pure language […] to shine upon the original all the more fully.” This is Smillie’s work described: he translates the objects he finds into art, all the while preserving their history. Translation also offers the original a new life again, or rather—à la Benjamin—an “afterlife,” which is to say, a continued life. In “Tempo 85,” Smillie asks his viewers to give these objects, like he has, a second chance; he succeeds.

Review of “Tempo 85″ at Espace Maurice (Montreal) for C Magazine, 2023

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“For a mystic, the inner world is a weather that contains the universe and uses it as symbolic language.” The artist, kin to mystic, has a similar relationship to their inner world, using the universe behind the veil to develop their own visual vernacular. For the artist Camille Jodoin-Eng, the terrain of that world, of its feelings and curiosities, is the basis for her growing group of invented symbols. She dips into that world’s depths and out of intuition they emerge: some as simple as an oval or curved line; others, like the papier-mâché pieces on view at Convergence at the Frog Pond, more elaborate. There are experiences that inspire her works—water moving over rocks in a small creek, flocks of birds undulating in the sky, a friend putting on their makeup—but these exist more like spiritual references for the abstract forms they’re related to. Her symbols, born from a wordless place, are a mystery even to Jodoin-Eng, and she invites others’ interpretations. I think of what 13th century poet Rumi once wrote: “If the nut of the mystery can’t be held, at least let me touch the shell.” If the nut of the mystery can’t be held, then at least we all can describe, in our own language, the way the shell feels pressed against our skin. We can also of course speculate what exists beyond. Sharing our respective descriptions and guesses—honouring the multivalence—can lead to the tremendous widening of our inner worlds. For Jodoin-Eng, part of her practice is contemplating the mystery together. 

Convergence at the Frog Pond is also inspired by quiet pockets we may find in a forest while on long hikes. It’s difficult in present times, though, to find a spot in nature free from the mark of heedless people—think of the litter often found peppered through fields of perky or flattened grass. I imagine Jodoin-Eng discovering a clearing within the forest, the vestiges of human presence strewn about, and going beyond removal: instead, guided not only by care but creativity, she gathers whatever discarded object— plastic bottles, electrical wiring, industrial spools—and finds a place for them in her art, the lilypad sculpture in Convergence an evocative example. I think of magpies, or bower birds, who cumulate objects made by nature or man to fashion something sublime. What Jodoin-Eng’s art does—and invites her viewers to do—is try, despite pain and destruction, to never forgo the creative impulse. We need it in order to survive.

Exhibition text for “Convergence at the Frog Pond” at Patel Brown (Toronto), 2022

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I remember my caterpillar experience

Behind what I can’t
Bring into focus is
Maybe you or
A small truth I’m
Finding in
Certain places like
The blindspot
In a rearview mirror or
The light on in
Another room
I guess I am the fool I guess
I am the soupy wings of
A butterfly forming
It’s nice this heightened
Vulnerability and that
I need it to transform
I am sleeping 
Without dreaming
I am failing towards
Something big
Still space
Between us
No longer being like
Is it time
To peel it open
I love to not know and 
Get the deep kick that
Makes me cry or
Write something down
It keeps happening
I praise the image forming
And loving blindness
Exploding behind the veil
Like taking care
And saying thanks
Before I leave
For good

Poem in response to “Unfoldings” at April April (New York), 2022

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The title of The Cruise (1998) has a twofold meaning. It alludes to the sightseeing tours Timothy “Speed” Levitch, the film’s central subject, gives on New York City’s double-decker buses, tours that garnered a cult following in the late ‘90s. It’s also a reference to Levitch’s self-created doctrine: to “cruise” is to live nomadically, loyal to the present moment, and in dissent of the thraldom of conformity.

Directed by Bennett Miller and skillfully edited by Michael Levine, The Cruise is a strong piece of nonfiction portraiture, a depiction of a man in a wearing search for meaning. Footage was filmed twice—the first summer with a crew, the second, in the wake of DV cameras advent, just Miller—but only the second iteration was used, where Levitch, experiencing “self-consciousness fatigue”, let his performative guard down. The result is an honest portrayal of common artistic struggle, oscillating from scenes of Levitch’s brilliant, trenchant monologues in front of tourists or the camera, to others that are all too familiar: banal and bureaucratic encounters that curb the potential of Levitch’s existence. He refers to this as the “anti-cruise”, and the film offers examples: meagre pay and hours at work, his conservative family’s expectations, and a brief spell of incarceration.

“Anti-cruise” is essentially anti-change, whereas to “cruise” is to believe in and strive for a better world. He knows that cruising entails failing repeatedly, but it also means living a life motivated by adventure and love. Levitch is aware, for instance, that the pursuit of individuality, at the crux of cruising, is a delusion, but that doesn’t mean it’s not worth the effort. “Biologically, we have the same infrastructure as plants,” he says. “[But] I want to be the flower that smells most profusely, that veers most drastically towards the sunlight.”

Review of Bennett Miller’s film “The Cruise” (1998) for In The Mood magazine, 2022

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Combining documentary, narrative fiction, critical essay, and poetry, Level Five (1996) is one of Chris Marker’s many ingenious anomalies. The film follows Laura, a newly widowed computer programmer, as she completes her late husband’s unfinished video game, a task she herself has chosen to take on. Like mourning, it is an enterprise, though a more concrete one. Laura’s grief is an influence but not a detainer: it affects but does not stop her thinking. She adds new truths next to old ones. Time, she declares, is an invisible insect that chronically stings whoever lives. But those stings are not just the pain or nuisance that commonly defines them; they’re also reminders of her humanity. Time is life’s permanent tenor, steadfast and impartial, and there is no stopping it. Not like she is trying to fight it: resignation and curiosity are her framework, and she engages each ache under no illusions. Different interpretations get sowed in the same dirt where others have already been buried. The dead repose beside—and inside—the living. The connotations of this are Laura’s main consideration; or, more precisely, they are Marker’s, who knows the past is veined through each person like a network, too bound up to be undone or circumvented.

A probe of time’s influence on memory and affect, both personally and culturally, is signature Chris Marker, the fulcrum of all his films. So, too, is his inimitable form of expression: enigmatic, fragmentary, and tongue-in-cheek. For Marker, there are no answers, only what patterns can be made from connecting loose ends. In Level Five, he assembles a bricolage of his favoured subjects—Japanese culture, the burgeoning of technology, a world after War—as the foundation from which to explore the never ending question of Time. Typical of Marker too is inventing characters to make his inquiries for him, knowing that fiction can push back on the borders that close in on storytelling when one has to remain faithful to the facts. Not like a common veracity would likely interest Marker anyway, as history is largely an art that strives for perfect truth in the face of great bias. No; Marker’s “gentle mission,” like that of Roland Barthes (as Wayne Kostenbaum writes in the introduction to A Lover’s Discourse) is “to rescue nuance.” For Marker, it has always been about the overlooked, the details that evade the wide angled view: that which pricks, like Barthes’ punctum, or the things that, as underscored in Sans Soleil (1983), quicken Shōnagan’s heart. With fiction, characters that act as proxy for Marker can hone in on elaborate states of feeling—or the nuanced—without eclipsing what is objectively factual. (In his more documentarian films like Grin Without A Cat, nuance is the overlooked subjects he interviews. He often aimed, as he states in a mid-aughts interview, “[t]o try to give the power of speech to the people who don’t have it,” to those who had “no tools to be heard,” and to those neglected by a sole, autocratic narrative.) Marker, like Barthes, wants “an armistice with perception’s systemic injuries” (Koestenbaum): to be free to adapt and dilate that perception. It’s about discovering other worlds while remaining in this one. “Okay, it’s fiction,” Veronique says at the end of fellow New Waver Jean-Luc Godard’s La Chinoise (1967), “but it brings me closer to reality.”

In Level Five Marker invents Laura, played by French actress Catherine Belkhodja. We meet her via the diaristic videos she records while working on the game, all of them a one-sided communion with her dead husband whose name we never learn. Despite the intimacy this implies, we are not alienated as viewers. The videos are mostly philosophical and poetic musings, an out-loud processing, that help her reckon with the labyrinthine game he’s left her, the one she alone strives to complete. This strategy-based game, which is also never named, concerns the small Japanese island of Okinawa during the Second World War, and its goal is to offer its players alternative outcomes to the tragic events that unfolded. The real Okinawa was, at the point of Marker’s filming, still embalmed by the brutal trauma of WWII: over the Spring of 1945 the so-called Battle of Okinawa ensued, killing nearly half of Okinawa’s civilian population, with many of the deaths a result of suicide and ritual killings induced by Japanese propaganda. Japan may have moved on by the time of the film’s creation in 1997, bolstered by the country’s obsession with rapidly modernising itself, but to Okinawa’s survivors it remained a lacuna, unaddressed. (“[But] that’s how history advances,” Marker tells us in Sans Soleil, “plugging its memory as one plugs one’s ears.”) There are ways in which this can be rectified, but Marker is more interested in how this institutes a hauntology: the past may be omitted while creating a new future, but it is never absent. As the film moves from footage on Okinawa to Laura in the workroom and back, we see the differences in how this manifests: while Japan will not acknowledge the elephant that haunts its room, Laura holds each fact’s gaze—her husband is dead, her memory of him is fading—even in her desire to turn away. One painfully represses; the other painfully integrates. Only one of these pains has integrity.

Eventually Laura stops working on the game. It’s unclear what stage her grief is at when she does, but there are many indications of the experience having granted her perspectives that will aid her in coming to terms. “I can recognise myself in that little island because my most unique, my most intimate suffering is also the most banal,” she observes at one point. At another, she admits she’s afraid that something “as potent as a song” will no longer be her and her husband’s anymore, but instead “everyone’s to share.” She vocalises her fears to displace them, to see past the pain of another of the insect’s many stings. As time builds without stopping, memory gets subsumed into the large fabric of history, losing not only its potency but its sanctity. It all goes; she is simply being reminded. By the end, Laura has had enough reminders; she’d “come to a limit; beyond it, the game was not hers anymore, nor was history.” She engaged with her wound, asked the questions, felt whatever arose. The limit is an invitation for her own deliverance. Taking the hint, she disappears.

Review of Chris Marker’s film “Level Five” (1996), 2022

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There’s a moment in On The Beach at Night Alone where Young-hee, the film’s protagonist, has left a café, no longer tolerating her role as uncomfortable witness to the squabbling of her two friends. But she can’t leave completely—she has plans for dinner with them and a few others that evening—so she waits. Outside, Young-hee spots a cabbage and crouches to meet it. White on top with a green skirt, she uses both her hands to pet its firm leaves and wavy folds. Then she leans in to smell, and stays there, her eyes closed and body hovering. The music, mostly of violin, swells. It’s a tender moment with the cabbage, its small, delicate form. Then: “What are you doing?” The man of the bickering pair has come out to fetch her. She follows, rushing in, the intimate moment over. The film is punctuated by instances like this: whether Young-hee is alone or with another woman, men are frequently interrupting, less as threat, mostly as neutral. But they’re around. I kept wondering: what if they weren’t? What if Young-hee had these experiences of solitude or female bonding without the flow broken; with the possibility of things unfurling, being. What would happen then? What if she was just left alone?

On The Beach follows Young-hee, an actress, navigating the kind of pain that’s crystallized by a fraught romance. In the wake of an affair with a married film director and the resulting social stigma, she leaves Seoul for Germany before coming back to South Korea, to the sea town of Gangneung. Despite her grief, Young-hee still engages with the world: she goes to a Hamburg bookstore and asks the owner to play music he composed, screams about dying graciously after too much sake, draws faces in sand on the beach before falling asleep in front of them. In the film’s denouement, she has dinner with her old lover and his film crew as he happens to be in Gangneung on location, and what is typically a private affair—a maudlin reunion between the two participants of a brief and piercing love—occurs and unfolds quite publicly. But the encounter and its rigorous catharsis is tolerated by the others at the dinner not out of fear or politeness; it seems as if they all understand, are bearing witness to two things that are really quite common: love’s sororal pain, and a woman’s anger.

As a straight woman, and like many straight women, Young-hee feels both desire and antipathy towards men (also straight). Drunk at the dinner with friends, she talks about the ones she met in Germany, how “inside they’re the same. Men all want the same thing”. Anger can lead to negligent generalizations, but after her reunion with the director, I wondered if you could really blame her. When she tells him, even if tinged with sarcasm, “Thank you director, for everything. You loved me so much! So I’m thankful”, he leans across the table and earnestly responds, “It was because you were so pretty”. “Let’s get rid of all the men, and love each other,” she tells her friend, a woman, at the earlier dinner, before they kiss for a long time. I know she’s half-joking—I’ve heard various women in my life say some variation of the phrase—but I wonder, too, about the real frustration it also emerges from: that women desire something that at best will strive to understand them, and at worst is generally responsible for their subjugation. I wonder too if this isn’t more the kind of suffering that Young-hee is experiencing. What would it be like to want a man but not need one? What if it’s not about being chosen by her lover than it is about being free of the desire to be chosen by a man at all?

It’s a deeper question emerging from a more meaningful suffering, one that is already taking her beyond her desire for The Director. When her friend asks her what made her stop at the edge of a bridge to drop in prayer, she says it was to determine what she wants: “[It’s] to live in a way that suits me. To be strong, and whatever happens, live in my own way.” “Oh,” her friend responds. “I thought you were missing that guy again.” She may still, but Young-hee knows too that loneliness is a fruitful condition, and by not denying it, she’ll reach the maturity needed to live according to her dictate. And the men will continue to appear, as they always do. Her task, like that of every woman, is learning to live with them, and sometimes, in spite of them.

Review of Hong Sang-soo’s film “On the Beach at Night Alone” (2017), 2022

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Good Morning

for Anne

Again the mind
Splits without notifying the body,
Marooned and alert, hearing
Echoes of its litany. Residue of
Madness, that long education.
Free of resentment it lets her rave, knowing
No thought should be rejected nor
Deposed. If so, they will return. One lesson
Of many: there is always room at the table.

Think of him first. Desire to be expected.
Safe is the benign option, to glean details like
Souvenirs; a process that can stretch years.
Craving should mostly be condemned: an
Old belief reached in error, taught from
Without, accepted in fear.
Smart to sully what’s engrained. Say:
I can sprint like desire too, have
Battle acumen, and turn corners when
I sense I may be felled. I
Must challenge me. If not
I move forward so slow I seem to linger.
Besides: why should responsibility detain me?
I may not soar if the ground gives out
Beneath my feet, but now I won’t descend.

Then it comes into focus:
Outside the bedroom window
The smoke tree has finally bloomed
Its plumes of gossamer. Meaning:
The summer is nearing its close.
Each day the heat thins. It’s
Time that does this, the weathering.
Adjacent birds speak as I greet the tree,
Then my supine form.
Hello, body. I
Stretch you like a cat.
Light fractured by lowered blinds
Peppers the sheets.

Poem for Commo magazine, 2021

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Getting the Hang of It

You rise first
Nestled and warm
You watch your friends sleep
And see the child in them

Moving now

Edge of lake
Alone and denuded
Water is cold
You run into it

Baraka wrote
On closing the eyes
An act so simple
You float

When the eyes meet the ceiling to go beyond
When you sink feet hit the muddy floor
Head ride

Wet beads drying upon you
Wet cans of soda, pink towel, dog
Greet you at the campsite

An August peach bursts
Between your teeth
And soil catches what drips out

In act two
You abandon all that
Precludes the original joy

You float
(Dog licks your leg)
You feel love

All is still
Like you
You’ve made it so

Poem for Shrapnel magazine, 2020

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“Although Lena is a traditional poet, Lucas and Laura are certainly visual ones (self-proclaimed too). And the true poet has faith. This faith persists despite many of them being dysthymic, as life gives all of us reason to be. Trauma, pain, poverty, life, may trick the poet into believing they’ve lost faith, or hope, or beauty, but they never do. These things never disappear, they only hide. It’s people like Laura, or Lucas, or Lena, that go searching for them—for the first time, or repeatedly—and get illuminated in the process. Then they do or make things, afflatus-like, that illuminate others too.”

Excerpt from review of “the body is a butter brain” at Calaboose (Montreal) for Peripheral Review, 2019

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Please excuse me

The failure of words
Is not a sentence.
I can interpret with success but
To succeed doesn’t always mean
To understand.
I want to understand.
Heart or head you
Can’t have both.
You’ll have to excuse me!
This is not something
I have arrived at with ease

I find Truth in
Inferential processes that are
So tied to straight
Thinking.
I can touch my tongue to the
Blade and make it wet.
Feeling is an axiom but
Only to me.
Maybe I can
Wet your blade too

I believe in intuition, the ability
For me, and you, for
More than just us to dip into meaning, to
Share it. What if I can’t tell you or
Show you. What if you just have to
Trust me

(Baudrillard said this thing about the
Shroud of Turin: that
Regardless of its lack of veracity it
Was faith that gave it its
Authenticity)

In the heavy pause between
Encounters I am still connected to you.
Dolorous it may seem but.
You haven’t gone missing.
Grief and restriction only happens if
You think of body as requisite
For making contact

Look, I am just trying to give form to what lacks it but
I’m only realizing that it’s
Hard. Thankfully I know that
I don’t have to fill the gaps anymore. I’ve come to laud
Voids. A reverence for extended silence.
To induce stillness is an act. Not doing
Nothing. I guess I’m finally
Getting it

Poem to accompany “Wires webs veins nerves roots stems” at 8eleven (Toronto), 2018

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We learn people as we do language. An intonation, a gasp of air, a long pause. What are these tiny details but revelations and obscurities at once. Lessons of the spirit. To try and reach the transcendent and fail, but in that failure find closeness. That’s fine. Connection, friendship, it’s the closest I’ll get to the divine.

Memories, like words, often evade me. They sit on the tip of my tongue and stay there until they fade; a simple reminder that they don’t belong to me. It’s times like these I need others to enlighten me. I prefer the tenderness of working together than confronting a burden alone. Besides, a memory that belongs to one person can only bear that name, but a shared memory can sometimes be called history. 

I can’t describe to you when we met, or when we evolved beyond acquaintance. We meet several times, first in groups, then alone. Eventually I am surrounded by warmth. I don’t intellectualize this experience, but I pay attention. 

There are parts of my friends’ souls that are kept. Each effort to access them is a barren one, but stubbornly, I’ll try again. They don’t know it, but I ache with every attempt, and when the pain is eventually alleviated its coupled memory loses its power. We all suffer from repeating ourselves, but some of us have better excuses. Another way to describe it is admitting defeat, and accepting the unknown with grace, then surrendering to the desire of wanting more. 

I am ambitious and misguided. What did Cassavettes say? “Love is the act of not knowing.” He was right. My truest friends I will never understand completely. Their value is in their mystery.

Exhibition text for “Trident” at Sibling/Little Sister gallery (Toronto), 2017

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