saunter iv
Pushing the stone up the hill, the white of death on my palms, keeping me from slipping.
The White of Death
I started this month with a dream in my childhood home. In the dream, I am tasked with caring for a wild bird, so I place it in a box with grasses and blankets, and feed it diligently in the rain-pale light of a small room on the ground floor. Eventually, I leave for lunch with my family, and when I return the bird is dead…having died because no one was there to feed it. It died with the food right next to its enclosure. As I hold the lifeless bird in my hand, it turns from a gray bird to a white bird with a brilliant tail of long, white, arching feathers. The bird’s chest is sunken in, and its already fragile frame so delicate it could collapse if I tighten my grip. I distinctly remember thinking or hearing or feeling the phrase “the white of death.” And when I woke, I felt the sharpness of that phrase cut through my mood like a spark in the dark. The white of death. What did it mean? Why were those the words I remembered?
A dream, when it’s a good one that really means something, is a poem written by the subconscious mind. A dream sends our mind through a ritual of experience and reveals to us what our subconscious has caught while our conscious mind juggles the ins and outs of everyday life. I hold this bird, its body already decomposing to a flour of ash in my palm; words are summoned somewhere from the dark…the white of death.
The white of death: when an animal body passes from life and it’s corpse falls into earth leaving behind only stone-blonde bones.
The white of death: memory, over exposed by time, fragments of us that once seemed a mile deep burned up and away in a flash.
The white of death, the dry spittle on the corners of a loved one’s gaping mouth in the final moments of spirit tethered to body.
The white of death, the bright void we return to when our body finally fails, spiraling through a portal that’s been clawing at us since birth, filling us with a dangerous yearning.
The death wish. The white death wish. The piercing bright light emerging from some cosmic source in an abyss of dark, black nothing. Somehow the white of death is what we leave behind when we go…like the impression of the sun when you close your eyes after looking too long at a sunset.
I feel the white of death on my hands this month, under my nails, and in the corners of my eyes when I wake up. It floats in the air like smoke, and pools in the cup of water at my bedside. It’s what floats over Los Angeles on a windless day, it’s the foam at the edge of a breaking wave.
Perhaps this ritual, this dream, that started my month is my subconscious mind’s way of confronting grief. Perhaps “the white of death,” put most simply, is grief.
Ludlow
We arrived at Pisgah Crater around 9pm on a moonless night. Pisgah is an ancient volcano in the Mojave Desert of California. We stretch our legs, and begin navigating the raven-black lava fields in the dark. The rock is hard and often sharp, puckered with pockets where air met molten lava thousands of years ago. I am enamored by the night ecology of the crater— mounds of black rock snaking through a white sand, sprinkled with the silver webs of black widow spiders, normally reclusive in city scapes, glinting out in the open against our headlamps.
The black widows have never looked so at home to me—their sleek black bodies perfectly matching the sleek black rock. An occasional silver moth will dance and land, dance and land, adding another tear of silver against the landscape. A pale-green cactus, a myriad of miniature desert grasses, a six-legged creature Will pronounces the latin name for and I immediately forget. And desert mouse, fluent in the textures of the rock and sand, weaving her way through the crevasses directly below our feet.
I don’t capture much on camera. I don’t really feel like it. Instead, I am busy drinking a beer with my head down looking at rocks. For hours, Kirt and I scamper the desert floor, much like hungry desert mice, looking for rocks. I know nothing about rocks, but the feeling of having nothing to do but just observe what’s in right below my nose is…well something I truly value these days more than anything. Being present, not owing anyone anything. Melding into the landscape. Being an animal.
I have never been called to the desert. It’s always seemed too dry to me, and I’m a big fan of running water. This year, in having the privilege of being partners with a naturalist and in turn having an abundance of naturalist friends, I’ve learned to feel the music in desert rhythms. The music is in the contrast between the vastness of a dusty mountain and the kaleidoscopic detail of a sidewinder’s scales.
The human footprint is cast in whips of freeway and train track, and passerby don’t stay long enough to learn what the white of death means out here in the sun and sand.
Ludlow is about 25 minutes away from the crater. A town of ten or so people, but I find even that hard to believe. There’s a gas station, a diner, and a motel, where we stay for two nights. We meet a couple driving a 1965 bright orange mustang across the US from Wisconsin on Route 66, a trip they’d been planning for nearly ten years. They made it to the end of Santa Monica Pier and are on their way back when we catch them outside smoking cigarettes and enjoying whiskey in the setting sun.
Ludlow is one of those towns that has that palpable feeling of mystery in the twenty paces between the Arco and the Dairy Queen. So many faces and stories have passed through on that whip of road to wherever we were going, and it feels like the landscape remembers us all.
Bella’s Comet
Bella reminds me of a David Lynch character— a boiling charisma maintained through an unrelenting propane-blue heat underneath. A Gemini.
We met on instagram and decided to shoot together while she is in town visiting from France. We decided on shooting at the LA River, I’ve wanted to do work at the river for years but the stars have never quite aligned. Shooting with Bella was a reminder as to why—it’s not easy. It’s not very accessible, the angles are strange, the ground is a boring gray, and it smells bad.
If you’ve shot with me before, you know that my process usually requires the subject to get comfortable with elements. So when the elements are prohibitive, it makes it difficult for the scene to feel truly immersive, like the subject belongs there.
And that’s the funny thing about the LA River…it belongs here, we’ve forced our way in…and yet we still don’t quite fit. In fact, forcing our way in has forced us out.
I told her not to move back to LA, a projection maybe, but things truly seem to be hard for everyone. Rent, for most of my friends and myself, is a constant point of stress. We’re tired. The world is exhausting. You know I really think that if we could solve the rent problem, the art would return. If people could afford to live, they would actually live in the ways we are meant to live, and maybe have the energy to say something about it.
Instead, we sell our lives. We stand in digital breadlines instead of physical ones. I get in line a few times a week, posting images and content to get a ladle full of attention so I can somehow keep my art career going for another month. We all post, desperate for a taste of relevance because in this economy attention can and does put actual bread on the table. And we are all doing it to one another. What is even an audience anymore? We are all completely captive, because we all depend on it.
I like to think of this scene with Bella as a moment of reprieve from the digital race. Perhaps Bella spent all day filming reels for a new brand in Frog Town. Perhaps she pops her shoes off to sit by the river and decides, against her better judgement, to dip a toe in. But just as her foot hits the water, she’s filled from toe to crown, like a napkin soaking up spilt milk, with a feeling of profound sadness. Or maybe longing.
Definitely both.
Because the water stinks, and the concrete is hard, and the trees are out of reach. But, the last bit of sun is golden and warm, and the water’s reflection of the tree is somehow more beautiful than the tree itself— Los Angeles!
And just after the sun sets, when the concrete slips from gray to blue and the handful of frogs still left in Frog Town begin to croak, a dandelion comet appears, as bright and white as the moon, with a stem stretching a brilliant white tail of mist across the sky.
“An interesting omen,” Bella thinks to herself, half serious.
She watches as the arch of bone-white mist dissipates, warps into a cloud of Saturn, punctuated with a dash of red. She watches until it’s nearly gone, fallen silently upon the city she may choose to return and thinks again “…an interesting omen.”
Announcements
Projections Print Release
Thank you SO much to everyone who bought a print. Can’t wait to start seeing people receive their pieces.
The Pulse of Grass and Screen- Solo Show in NYC
I’m opening a solo show in New York City in July at The Lockerroom Gallery. The show, I’ve just decided, is called The Pulse of Grass and Screen.
Youth in the face of apocalypse. Solitude in the wake of singularity. Beauty in the fallout of abstraction. A show about skin to skin to grass to vape contact. Neoliberalism is the context, my friends, my family and myself are the subjects. It’s works you’ve mostly seen, but this time in person.
The Parody of a Tangled Thread with Setanta Books
Finally, I’m releasing my first book this year of a collection of work from 2022 called The Parody of a Tangled Thread. It’s some of my most classic images. Hopeful release date is October . I’m not announcing it yet outside of those who read to the end of my substack hehe":)