How are you doing.
I ask mother.
Still breathing.
She says.
So I begin with words.
To ensure my ideas come from the moisture
the heat the movements of someone else's.
Breathe in the air.
Smell the flowers while you can.
I don't want to show you a glove without the hand that changed its shape. I don't want to show you a perfume before it touches your skin. I don't want to show you gold without your fingerprints on it. I don't want to show you a room without you dancing in it. I don't want to show you a mother's coat without showing how it looks on you. I don't want to make images that stop on the left and right sides of your window.
If art makes the rock more rocky.
Then it makes the rain more wet.
The snow more cold.
The machine more machined.
The fragrance more fragrant.
The model more modelled.
The stage more staged.
The world more world.
I want to paint directly on the world.
I want to create myths that we can one day become.
I want to build a palace of perspectives, of elaborate visions and objects and constructions and languages and sounds and smells that stretch beyond our peripheral vision and in through the cracks of our lives. Things that blow past our rose tinted cheeks and follow us home.
Because a found audience is better than a targeted one.
To find our audience we speak first.
We say what we want to say.
With the things we want to say, with.
We then let those who want to listen, listen.
We give ourselves no name.
The minute we name ourselves we disappear.
I spend my days thinking about what happens to a thing when we try to capture it. Can we leverage it? We say.
Like an old tree, we become rigid through too much intelligence. We lose what we once knew how to do. How to twist and bend towards the light like a young sapling.
Like a gold mine,
the industry is always looking to mine.
To extract.
To name.
To perfect.
To sell.
I catch myself mining too.
I experience it.
I create it.
I put it on a stage.
And some things we leave in their place.
Living in big tall cities for the last ten years has taught me something about the way we city folk perceive rain, rats, pigeons, snow, cockroaches, and spider webs. How we believe that any part of nature that does not comfort us shall be removed.
I write this as I wear my shoes at my desk.
I would prefer not to use the words inside and outside to describe this studio.
If a mosquito could make its home above my head while I work, I would welcome its frequencies and company via a nervous truce. And let it dream my ideas for me.
We don't find new ideas by sitting in our offices in this big beautiful city. They aren't there. They are here. In real places. Where strangers say strange things. Where life stomps and stains the floors and walls and curtains. Where neighbours look neighbours in the eye and say strange things like good morning. I had to move to the big cities to see small cities clearly.
Big cities don't surprise us anymore.
They are predictable.
Perfect in their slick sentences and shiny images.
The problem with our cities is that they are afraid.
Afraid of small things.
Afraid of old things.
Afraid of not having new things.
Afraid of the outside world, so we create a country within a country.
Afraid of the small people that look like ants from the 100th floor.
It is up here that taste must tell money what it should do.
Don't rely on the machine, mother.
It can't grow up in a neighbourhood like yours.
The son reminds the mother at the casino,
in front of a machine that spins and spins,
producing infinite combinations of images that have no audience.
Smell the flowers while you can, Michael.
I believe there are two kinds of images.
World images and image images.
World images are a bodily function of the world.
They breathe out of the lungs of external landscapes.
Image images breathe out of other images.
World images come from things that touch our skin.
I want to appear exactly as I am.
Let the poetry come from in between the lines.
My mother kept my art supplies on her back for years.
A single bag in case I came home.
I still have your art supplies,
she'd tell me on the shelter's phone.
I don't make any difference between work and life anymore.
I work and work.
I live and live.
I work and live and work and live.
I work and live with people who find it faster to dance rather than to march to get anywhere.
We dance from room to room.
The thought and what happens before the thought.
The film and what happens before and after the film.
While fashion runs on two seasons.
The earth runs on four.
I want to set our feelings into motion like one long sentence, one long train that takes us out to the country where we collect our ideas in winter and back into the city where we project them in summer past the walls we touch to know we're still here past the grand houses we haven't entered yet past the rooms where strangers will become friends past the small lives happening beneath the big ones past the beautiful boy wearing his mother's makeup past the old bottles filled with something new past the silhouettes that follow us home through the holes in our history past the flowers pulled apart by rough fingers past the rusted machines spinning infinite combinations for nobody past my mother's trail of perfume past everything we referenced and everything we left on purpose past the work becoming life and the life becoming work until we forget whether we are inside or outside up or down and nobody remembers where we were supposed to be going but we find it easier to dance rather than to march and we are still moving and we are still moving and the sentence is still going and we're still breathing