A standing inertia cannot melt its white, brazen coat when it only thinks of balance. In fact, I imagine inertia would become less porous and more perilously vertical when it concludes to itself; at last, I am balanced. Here it declares, I know fire. When it has never been burned. I know soil. When it has never broken ground. I know rain. When it has preserved itself against every storm. I know breath. When it has not known its own to quicken.
In time, the hardening totem grows a pair of bloated pupils to account for its immunity to color, its vision is washed in brightness and it is flooded by the excess of essence, deprived of form.
It will look upon powerful beacons and transformative signs with harsh resentment since it feels from them only the bitterness of blithe shock. With a thought it will tilt, yet with a frame so rigid it will not fall and become as familiar with the dirt as it is with the thing it faces. Ravenous and blinded by exposure to the beauty of how things look, it cannot find itself in integration with the intangible representations placed before it, those which emerged from the elements of the world. Hoarding pretty stains of violence, shadows of seduction, and traces of erosion, in order to consume, still it does not encounter satiety in the slightest.
Meanwhile a pile of fruit rots in the alley and the intertious thing which has found itself bloodlessly congealed, can smell it decompose.
Here, something occurs. It spits up bile and knows nausea, tracing its cause.
Cracking its code it falls, dirtying clean walls with erupting humoral paint. When its eyes adjust, an ecstasy is felt which does not trail off as does shock, in seeing the yellows, the reds and the blues which forced themselves from cleanness. . . burning it, wetting it, soiling it, choking it.
Truly empty, it would now know hunger beyond restlessness. The possessing ambition to eat.
That intertious thing which stood for so long seeking wonder in beauty’s preservation, becomes aware beauty exists in surplus as a force which transgresses the atrophy of any body.
The white brazen coat effortlessly slips apart as the thing which once stood, now dances, swallowing sweet fruit and allowing the color to change inside itself. It finds the form of balance
—Eden Jolie
Partecipating artists:
Christina Ballantyne, Max Capus, Charlie Goering, Ziad Al Najjar, Ben Quinn, Madeline Seto and Nicolette Lim.
at SULK, Chicago
until May 20, 2023