Writings and Respones
Essays, reviews, and reflections on art and its surrounding questions. A space for thinking through material, ethics, perception, and the tensions that animate my practice.
Review of the ICA's "An Indigenous Present"
An Indigenous Present at the ICA brings together one hundred years of Indigenous abstraction and presents it as an active, living practice. The exhibition is organized by guest curators Jeffrey Gibson and Jenelle Porter, with support from Erika Umali and Max Gruber. The show is thoughtful and intentional, but it avoids confronting the historical and ongoing realities of stolen land, colonial violence, and the fact that the ICA itself sits on the unceded homelands of Indigenous people. This creates a noticeable gap in an exhibition that otherwise works with precision and intent. The exhibition opens with Mary Sully’s personality prints. Starting with these works feels deliberate. To me, they first seemed slightly understated and approachable, but further time spent with the work reveals a clear distillation from top to bottom or bottom to top. Pattern, portrait, and design condense into something much more acute. This compression, visible in each of the triptychs, suggests the crude American and colonial history of oversimplification projected onto Indigenous art. Sully’s work resists notions of simplicity while alluding to the colonial habit of looking, extracting, and reducing Indigenous culture into simplified fragments that supported theft, assimilation, and dismissal. Her works set the tone for an exhibition that is eclectic, layered, and grounded in abstraction. The show gains strength through artists whose material and conceptual choices resist passivity and reward sustained looking. Kimowan Metchewais is the standout to me. His works carry a visual and conceptual weight. Knowing that he kept them folded up in his car adds an exciting layer to the viewing experience. The unfolding and refolding become part of the work. The creases act as a record of movement, storage, and lived time. That implied performative history encourages the viewer to pay attention, to stay with the image, and to feel the instability and fragility embedded in it. Metchewais’s work holds the room and leaves the viewer with a lasting curiosity about him and his practice. Teresa Baker’s work stands out as well. Her use of AstroTurf is sharp. It performs the role of land in her compositions, yet its plastic surface refuses naturalism. The material choice carries more solemn implications. To me, the AstroTurf evokes harm, extraction, and the long-term environmental damage done to stolen land. It functions as an uncomfortable stand-in that refuses the romantic idea of the untouched landscape. Baker’s work raises these questions through material alone. The curatorial framing, however, treats the AstroTurf mostly as a formal device rather than a political one. That absence becomes more visible because the museum itself sits on land taken from Indigenous nations. This tension sits at the center of the exhibition. The ICA’s framing avoids naming the ongoing reality of the land beneath the building. Presenting Indigenous abstraction without acknowledging that context creates a gap that the art, on its own, cannot fill. The absence is not subtle. It shapes how the viewer experiences the show. The ICA benefits from this land while attempting to center Indigenous voices, and that contradiction deserves a direct, public acknowledgment. This raises questions about what long-term institutional commitment might look like. Would a permanent Indigenous gallery shift the dynamic? Would sustained programming signal responsibility rather than a temporary gesture? Would naming the land and its history less subtly create a more honest frame for the work? I do not claim to know the final answer, but the exhibition makes the need for these questions unavoidable. Still, An Indigenous Present achieves something important. It presents Indigenous abstraction as expansive, rigorous, and foundational. The exhibition succeeds in widening the understanding of what Indigenous art is and has always been, and it gives space to artists whose work expands the language of abstraction through precision and care. At the same time, it exposes a larger contradiction that extends beyond the ICA. Institutions benefit from stolen land while showcasing work rooted in cultures that survived attempts at erasure. The exhibition highlights the vitality of Indigenous abstraction, but it also makes clear what museums must address if they want to support Indigenous art with honesty, accountability, and respect.
Fall Semester Overview: Notes on Contact, Trace, and Orientation
This semester, I treated my studio work as an extended study of surfaces as records of contact. I worked through the question of how an artwork might hold the physical evidence of its own making without defaulting to the hierarchy of front and back. Transfer drawing became the center of this inquiry. Repeated impressions of a self-portrait gradually displaced resemblance and allowed the surface to behave as a field of accumulated events. What remained on the paper was not an image in a traditional sense. It was the result of pressure, friction, and touch. At a certain stage, the work no longer announced a proper orientation. It simply recorded. My research helped clarify why this loss of orientation felt significant. In Contact: Art and the Pull of Print, Jennifer L. Roberts articulates printmaking as a form of knowledge generated through touch and pressure. The print is not a reproduction of an image. It is evidence of an encounter between two surfaces. This understanding shaped how I approached the transfer. The backs of my drawings often held the most direct evidence of that encounter, even though they were never intended to be seen. Their value emerged not from resemblance but from the honesty of the contact that produced them. Around the same time, I was reading Rosalind Krauss on indexicality in 1970s art. Krauss describes traces, rubbings, and imprints as signs that communicate through physical causation rather than symbolic meaning. They function as what she calls “messages without a code,” events registered directly on a surface when the symbolic system no longer frames the act. This idea helped me understand why I was drawn to surfaces that had been touched to the point of becoming unreadable. Instead of presenting an image, the transfer becomes an index that points to the conditions of its making rather than to a representational subject. Krauss writes that such marks emerge at the moment when the conventional sign collapses into trace. That collapse became visible in my own work as resemblance gave way to the record of repeated contact. Marcel Duchamp’s concept of the infrathin also became important in understanding the slight differences that develop across the two sides of a transfer. Erin Manning writes about the infrathin as the smallest perceptible interval, a difference so slight that it resists classification. This idea allowed me to approach the distinction between front and back as a minimal shift rather than as a hierarchy. When two sides of a transfer become nearly identical, their relationship aligns with the infrathin. They differ, but not in a way that stabilizes one as primary. The interval between them remains open, contingent, and without preference. Jane Bennett’s writing on material vitality added another dimension to this thinking. Bennett’s account of matter as active and responsive offered a framework for understanding the transfer as something shaped not only by my decisions but also by the tendencies of graphite, paper, and pressure. The final surface records the behavior of the materials themselves. The work becomes less a product of intention and more a site where bodies, materials, and forces interact. Taken together, these ideas allowed me to articulate a position that had been forming in the studio. I am not interested in the front of the artwork or in the face that a viewer expects to meet. I am interested in the contact that produced the object. I am interested in the traces that accumulate when image is no longer the goal. I am interested in the moments when orientation breaks down and when surfaces register events without asking to be read. The paintings I produced this semester extend this logic. By placing time limits on myself, increasing the distance between my body and the surface, and blocking my direct line of sight, I created conditions where control gave way to the record. These methods produced divergences between intention and outcome, and these divergences mirrored the indexical shifts I pursued in the transfers. What I am working toward is a practice where the significance of the work is not located in a privileged side but in the accumulation of its making. The surface matters because it holds the history of contact. The distinction between front and back becomes a minor interval rather than an organizing principle. The work becomes a site of recording, and the record itself becomes the argument. This is the direction my practice is taking. It is rooted in contact, in material force, and in a belief that the event of making does not occur on one side alone. Notes: Bennett, Jane. Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things. Duke University Press, 2010. Krauss, Rosalind. “Notes on the index: Seventies art in America.” October, vol. 3, 1977, p. 68, https://doi.org/10.2307/778437. Manning, Erin. “For a pragmatics of the useless, or the value of the infrathin.” Political Theory, vol. 45, no. 1, 3 Aug. 2016, pp. 97–115, https://doi.org/10.1177/0090591715625877. Roberts, Jennifer L. Contact: Art and the Pull of Print. Princeton University Press, 2024.
The Posthumanist Supposings of a Supposed Posthumanist (Review of "A Sentient Land: Aesthetic Alliances with Forests, Beetles, Salt, and Air")
I want to start out by saying that I’m not really a self-proclaimed or, by any means, fully fledged posthumanist. But for the purposes of this review and for argument’s sake, the tone of this writing will be somewhat oriented in that direction. "Sentient Land: Aesthetic Alliances with Forests, Beetles, Salt, and Air" sets itself apart from many other exhibitions with the out-of-the-gate framing that, within the show, the human experience is and should be decentered. I’m personally quite a fan of this approach. The exhibition took the time to emphasize the sentience and significance of things like beetles, trees, plants, salt, and air. It was generous in its attention toward forces that typically operate in the periphery of human perception. I think it truly was a wonderful show. The curator, Shana Dumont Garr, is fabulous, and I had the pleasure of briefly chatting with her after spending some time with the exhibition. What makes it so strong, in my opinion, is the way it bred so many questions for me. One of the things I kept thinking about was its decentering of humans and the explicit claim that it was focused on doing that. It’s interesting to think about... to spread posthumanist ideals and the value of decentering the human experience, you have to present those ideas to humans. The exhibition, by virtue of being an exhibition, is literally an experience engineered for human consumption, or at the very least human witness and experience. The works are made by humans, brought together by humans, curated by humans, and then witnessed and speculated upon by humans. The video work "Trees communicate with each other at 220 hertz" by Nelly-Eve Rajotte especially stayed with me. The sounds in the installation were created from the vibrations of trees communicating with each other. When I saw it and heard it, it was eerie and beautiful and vast and large. It demanded respect from me. I loved it, and I was also quite afraid of it. The sounds that the trees created extraordinarily shaped that experience for me. But I had to question the ethics of it, especially within a posthumanist exhibition. The sounds, vibrations, and wavelengths that trees and plants use to communicate with each other were harvested, extracted, and presented in a way that is consumable to humans. There’s something immensely fascinating and almost exploitative about that. The artist took something valuable in its own right to the sentience that is able to experience it and transformed it into something humans can hear and process. Is that not, in some sense, the opposite of decentering the human experience? I loved and appreciated the vexing ethical questions this exhibition brought up for me. The tree sound piece truly was excellent, beautiful, and unnerving. The sounds were quite necessary. But having these complex questions of ownership, respect, awareness, and consent with non-human sentiences to me felt enormously valuable. The exhibition heightened and magnified these tensions. It also had me questioning the ethics of aesthetics. Many of the works were very lovely to look at. I think that’s a useful tool for garnering the attention and interest of people who do not typically ponder posthumanist philosophy and perhaps, sneakily and skillfully, drawing them in in order to begin to contemplate it. But once again, it risks recentering the human experience. The exhibition had a kind of damned if they do, damned if they don’t quality about it. With posthumanist ideals and human decentering as the main scaffolding, it’s hard to fully accomplish the goal of fully decentering the human. The exhibition is beautiful and splendid to encounter. Does that mean it overvalues human-chosen aesthetics? If it were heinous to look at, would that still be centering the human experience, because it would be engineered to make humans feel displeased, engineered for humans to experience and take something away from it? These questions continually flickered about throughout my encounter with the show. Other interesting thoughts surfaced as well. Spirituality and mysticism hovered near the forefront of my mind. I’ve been thinking somewhat abstractly about matter and coincidence and what it means to inhabit a body among other bodies, and this exhibition helped clarify those thoughts. The posthumanist framing encourages a repositioning of the self, not primarily as a human subject, but as a lucky little cluster of particles moving through a landscape composed of other lucky little clusters of particles. From that vantage point, the act of making a mark becomes an energetic exchange. A mark made in time, in space, with sound, with movement, with contact, with vibration, with energy, with thought, with intention. What begins to emerge is an awareness of the improbable convergence of particles inhabiting the same space at the same time, coming into contact with one another, experiencing one another, and together constituting the moment each is able to experience in its own right. The particles that make up a body can be comprehended as singing in unison with those that make up the surrounding space. One becomes more of a conscious participant in the pulse and beat of things, joining the marching on of time while also recognizing that nothing and everything exists outside of it. The position of self shifts from central agent to fortunate participant and thankful witness, filled with appreciation for the transcendental nature of coincidence. My personal take on A Sentient Land is that it succeeds because it refuses to ignore the tensions that it presents. Its attempt to decenter the human is necessarily entangled with human making, human perception, and human aesthetics. That entanglement sharpens the show and asks viewers to reconsider their position within a living field of forces while simultaneously implicating them in the very structures they are asked to question. It leaves one suspended between reverence, critique, awe, and ethical unease. If posthumanism demands that we shift our orientation without pretending we can fully escape ourselves, then this exhibition performs that demand with honesty.