All tagged 2021
I have had the ambivalent pleasure of playing witness to my sister’s practice these past few years. I will call her Nico, as she prefers, though as to whether or not Nico is synonymous with my sister, I cannot be sure – her being a body, as she writes, of “colliding personas and intimate intricacies.” My mother (our mother) once asked if Nico had a mother. The question was met with silence, left unanswered. Indeterminacy, you see, is what Nico embodies; being unlocated, insensible to boundaries, alert to the oneness of disparate things.
Published in Raritan, Rutgers University Press, 2021. “BBC News Online, Monday, 12 November 2018. Today’s news is black with ash. A wildfire burns in Malibu, the town of Paradise is razed, and the Californian sky is dark with smoke. In a Mexican city, two men mistaken for kidnappers are set alight. An article with the headline ‘Judgment Day’ tells not of fire and brimstone but of incendiary politics. There is crossfire, too, another kind of kindling, which does not so much burn as inflame: ‘Israel-Gaza Violence Erupts After Covert Op Killings’.”
“The garage – as idea, as device – has proved a continued part of Blom’s practice. A prolific painter, many of his pictures are necessarily consigned to a box under the studio couch, to the storeroom, to a warehouse, that is out the way. Where some are forgotten, others ferment; their charge all the more apparent on finding them again. Still more follow a restless path, going “from table to floor to drying rack, to pile, back to table – collecting layers of marks along the way, before maturing into something worth nailing to the wall.” No longer wooed by impasto paint, Blom works in thinly applied pigment and oil stick, pursuing a novel flatness, which lends his pictures their more moveable form. The paintings, made on unstretched canvas, offer themselves to be rolled up, stacked, left in piles and otherwise neglected. Unlike his earlier works, they submit to rough handling.”
Here, a 55-minute film and a single word. The proposition is simple: a man runs into twisters in search of their still centre, looks for clarity in a dust cloud, for order within disorder. The quiet eye of the storm, however, is a fugitive fact, more apparent as a figure of speech than it is in a whirlwind. But still, the artist pursues its promise, runs time and again into the tornado’s spiraling chaos.