This is the storm. Along with the pandemic spreads knowledge of the existence of many pre-existing conditions: the uneven impact of state violence, the broken healthcare system, economic precarity, delusional and dysfunctional institutions and leaders, unsustainable habits of consumption and waste. Disbelief. The moment of danger Benjamin warned of, in which the past flashes up, is daily. Who will survive this progress?
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You have been running for a long time. When we met at Rutgers in 2017, you were getting back into training for competition while digging into your MFA work. I think of Paul Robeson, another Rutgers-educated artist-athlete. In the past I have run far and with more discipline than I do now.
Is This Not A Legacy is a love poem for objects and human remains housed in museums, closets, and collections. By love, I ask if your acquisition is rooted in longing, a confusion of desire, possession, and necessity. To you, artifacts and persons of the pasts, tell me: Were you a gift? Uprooted from funerary …
Matt Shelton, Untitled (fabel), 2020-2021. Animated GIFs transferred to digital video, 6 min. 13 sec. Text and images are sourced from Gone with the Wind (1939), including the June 2020 insertion of a qualifying statement before the opening credits: “This picture is presented as it was originally created.” This picture is created. as it originally …
“It has been suggested that if ever a plant deserved a monument for its service to mankind, it was bermudagrass for what it has done to prevent soil erosion, to stabilize ditch banks, roadsides and airfields, to beautify landscapes and to provide a smooth, resilient playing surface for sports fields and playgrounds.”
The pandemic in the United States has allowed for an experiment, at scale, in how a visually obsessed culture orients itself, frantically, toward the unseen—the virus, its transmission. Capture of the bodies suspected to be infected, or about to be infected, by this unseen, has intensified. The theater of security and quarantine has made legible …
Bad news. The beach is closed. No opening in sight. The memories are packed with nowhere to go, circling the center of my mind’s eye. I am adapted to bad news. It lands on a hard tall pile, cascading down with resettling rubble. In this I feel joined to each person politely sweeping the edges …
One of the things I want to get your thoughts on is your invocation of the vernacular form of “covering” or “doing a cover version” in much of your performative work, and the ways in which this connects to other conscious and unconscious performative modes, both academic and vernacular …