solips are plant-grown fruit (vegetables and fruits) overcorrected with bleach. A few are not edible growth, but urban weeds.
celery, water, traces of bleach and under-bed storage bins as a part of Exo Emo curated by Antoine Catala and Vera Alemani at Greene Naftali.
Exo Emo curated by Antoine Catala
and Vera Alemani at Greene Naftali.
Solips is not a word but in English it has related sounds to solipsistic, solo, solitary, lips, polyps
celery, water, traces of bleach and under-bed storage bins
installed as a part of I said, “say they” at Rond-Point Projects, Marseille.
press release, I said, “say they”
at Rond-Point Projects, Marseille.
Rond-Point Projects
Controlling food.
Empress tree, water, traces of bleach and storage bins
installed as a part of Pendant, curated by Tabitha Pisenoat WPN Projects, NY.
press release, Pendant at WPN Projects, NY.
WPN Projects
Routines of care.
Transparency is something we associate with honesty, purity, or letting someone in on something. Yet at the same time as a piece of plexi or glass reaches for the ideal of being looked through—honest, pure, and uninterrupted by glare and muddling reflections—it hides itself and meekly shrinks away. A way of receding, shrinking back, hiding in an act of exposing something, making something pure, or making something evident. In that way the formal qualities of transparency are very human and social, a kind of emotional and interactive complex between someone and the world around them. Active and passive. Transparency as a kind of camouflage. —meek and assertive—crossing ones feet and wanting to be imagined and seen as shouting.
celery, water, traces of bleach, resin sealed cardboard box
installed as a part of The Way You Look: Ashish Avikunthak and Tim Simonds, curated by Pete Moran at Burlington City Arts, VT.
Honeydew melon, papaya, carrot, daikon, onion, pineapple
installed as a part of Cathouse Retrospective, curated by David Dixon at Chemistry Creative, Bk.
beetroot, carrot, papaya, bleach, fishnet stocking
as a part of Dump Camp, a conference and sequence of performances organized and curated by Bethany Ides and Ari Ferdman in a lecture-class room at Cooper Union.
Hung in the window bays in netted bags. The clean smell of their bleached flesh wafts in with the open windows over the course of the day-long conference / sequence of performances. Dripping dry, and becoming more opaque as the day goes on and in the case of the beat, slowly re-reddening as it re-dyed itself from the inside out. How does this flesh take care of itself, inform itself? Is correcting, over-done, self defeating, self effacing?
On the floor in the same space are a set of prints (To do before washing hands) taped to the floor in the way of the walking paths of the classroom. Each print is an image of a hand with reminders and to-do lists written on them. Some of the images show a wet hand, with handwriting smudged or running.
These are the first solips or bleached vegetables and fruits. I had at the same time been bleaching single stems of celery and hanging amidst prints that I was making from my spelling errors in my correspondences to my students. solips have always been a form of hyper-correction that runs parallel to the way I have thought of a teacher’s insecurity, the position of a teacher’s voice that is correcting itself.
What happens if the badly idealized forms of teacher and learner are folded over each other? What is the centripetal-ness, the self-awareness, self-reflection, self-correction, selfishness, passive, meek and undependable nature of a position seen and idealized centrifugally, hierarchically, as selfless, active, responsible? Though I had started then to work with teaching as a material, I only realize now, that the space of Bethany and Ari’s conference/performances was the first time that I entwined my work with an environment of teaching; I had taught in similar classrooms for a few years and still do.
In grade school when you learn how plants work, at the same time, how human work, how the blood circling around makes its way back up your legs, you place a piece of celery in a cup of water and food coloring. You watch the red, blue or maybe yellow march its way up the stem and to its leaves.
pineapple, mango, beet, apple, squash, papaya, kiwi, traces of bleach, plastic bins
in House of Orange at Wilma Projects.
Horizons of whitening.
