The drawings shown here, as part of the group exhibition Some Kind of Mind Thing, Off Paradise, New York, NY, 2022, are selections from the series, fly, map; please forgive me for standing still, which began almost two years ago when, lying in bed, writing about the idea of an infinite chess game, I noticed two flies buzzing in my window frame.

 ***An infinite grid is a contradiction in terms between the immeasurable infinite and the finitizing, measuring gesture that is the grid. It is an aporetic thought that expresses an anxiety of never finding one’s way out of a grid’s coordinating and regulating system***

***In Through the Looking Glass, and What Alice Found There, Lewis Carroll’s famous Alice finds herself running with the Red Queen across a gridded chess world. As they run, the Queen “crying ‘Faster! Faster!” a breathless Alice realizes that her surroundings remain stationary around her. Though she has run to the point of exhaustion, she remains in the same place.***

Occasionally the flies took a quick zoom around my head before resuming this dance against the invisible barrier of glass. The window was open, that’s how they got in after all. I watched waiting for them to find that opening again and fly back out. I took my phone out and video recorded them. 

The flies caught in this small segment of grid (the window) initiated a long series of iterative and recursive motions. I began to make more recordings of flies in windows. Magnifying and re-centering each fly, frame by frame, in video editing software, I was able to produce ‘maps’ of these flies’ movement paths by way of keyframe marks produced by this process. Taking a screenshot of those keyframe marks, a blue constellation-like array, I trace each mark at the pixel level to produce a file readable by a pen-plotter machine. I have the machine draw, in pen and ink, one of these paths. Using a ruler, I then hand draw the first layer of grid work. I continue, building up layers of this process, a concatenation of the animal, the machine and the hand, spinning out webs upon webs of cartographic meaning. In each edited video of the flies, relegated to an unseen part of the process, the creature hovers, totally still in its frenetic attempt to escape the grid, dead center of the frame. 

Also on View:

One concrete cast hole from the series holes:

Since 2015 I have been digging holes. As a gesture, digging a hole is brutal and simple. Spatially, a hole is the most generic figure of a negative space. Holes signify nothing in at least two senses. It is also funny, absurd and totally arbitrary to dig holes for art. These holes have become oddly orienting loci of both the immediately surrounding landscape they were made in, the landscape traveled to and from their site and the memories both mundane and acute that coincided in time with them. In this way a narrative begins to write itself in and through holes.

Casts: Casting the holes on site creates a concrete membrane which transforms a hole into something I can carry with me.