PHOSPHENE

The Shake entered the room — or rather, we know it must have; we have found holes in the walls. Or rather, if ‘enter’ is not the appropriate word, we know it has impressed itself upon the room. There are artifacts. But The Shake is like a phantom, as in it has no need to conform to our boundaries — the walls of rooms, picture frames, the contours of our containers...and so terms like ‘entrance’ and ‘exit’ have less bearing in our evaluation of its behavior. And as ‘behavior’ goes our usual metrics can’t really suffice. We suppose it is watching us — but ‘watching’ is also too graceless a word for it. 

One imagination of The Shake is that it is an invisible vapor. A permeating mist that identifies us in that we are the parts of rooms and spaces that it distinctly does not fill. Therefore it, recognizing its own voids, forms a picture of our silhouettes. With the same method it would define the objects we interact with, like, perhaps, our glassware: with which we use to socialize amongst one another, and moreover they are receptacles for the fluids we use to, in turns, survive, energize, and disorient ourselves. The same method would define the symbols we build to identify and differentiate ourselves from one another, as in our visual conventions: flags, crests, ornamentation, sigils, patterns. And, pointedly, this same method would give The Shake opportunity to define our surroundings. We imagine an effort in this direction would be especially edifying for The Shake: to picture humankind’s surroundings so to identify the ways in which we are distinct from our surroundings. 

But this is all speculation. The evidence is rare, remote, and does not as yet sing out its meaning. We continue to observe. 

(Recited aloud at Gallery 157 at Pacific Northwest College of Art, Dec. 2022)

What I am getting at here — that is, what Max, your speaker, is getting at here — is a fictional narrative. As your speaker I am in the unique position to go on the record and tell you this narrative as it is, or at least how it exists in my head. So I will, and I ought to get this out of the way.

A sentient entity — of some kind of interdimensional or metaphysical provenance — intrudes upon the physical realm of humankind. This entity has been dubbed ‘The Shake’ by its observers — that is, humankind. Humankind has found artifacts of this intrusion and gathered them together in a scientific endeavor — or a number of variably science-adjacent endeavors — to observe and evaluate The Shake. If there is only one thing about The Shake’s behavior they can confidently speak to, it is that it is observing us just as we observe it.

I know this all to be the case. I know, at least, that it was from this narrative that each piece sprang, I know this, at least, if it is so that each piece doesn’t do enough to sing out their meanings. I opted, anyway, to tell the story in as slippery a fashion as possible — the fact is, as the narrative itself is so concerned with intangibility, slipperiness, and unfathomability — it would be logical to tell this narrative in an equally disorienting and difficult way. On top of that, the mystery is by and large the point.

I have, though, interspersed some clues. The writing beside each piece — on the pedestals and directly on walls — are not evidently traditional title placards like you’d find in a museum. For one, they’re handwritten in pencil or pen. Secondly they don’t offer the year of creation or the materials used. They are, essentially, hastily scrawled notes written out by the humans of the story, and plucked from it and placed here — their attempts to designate, imagine, and connect each of the pieces, as if they were, as is true in their narrative context, diagrammatic, exhibitive, and artifactual. For example, they have written beside one steel and light sculpture, “EMISSIONER,” and in brackets, “TRUE LENS, in observation of “The Conjoining Rite.”” In doing this I am able to identify, first, that these steel and light sculptures behold the title ‘Emissioners’ — of which there are three — and this one here is specifically known as ‘True Lens,’ and its function is to observe the drawing above it, titled “The Conjoining Rite.” On the one hand, as the artist and in the work’s context as a gallery show, I am able to use these scrawlings in place of traditional title placards to effectively give titles to two pieces in tandem — and they are in tandem; on the other hand, it would be advantageous for the humans of the story to designate their findings, along with the machines they use to observe them, in categories and by functionality — additionally they would write this down in notation and in shorthand before ever reporting their findings in full and in clear language, and it is at this stage that we enter the story. Similarly scrawled notes are found beside each piece and explain to some degree their origin — such as in the case of The Punctures, the two plaster sculptures set below the drawings Emission and Isthmus, which state ‘cut from its wall, one of two found — discovery!’ And so on.

Another way I have opted to tell the story is through the characterization of material. First let me list out all of the materials on display: mild steel, fiberglass, epoxy resin, mirrors, steel cable, puck LEDs, charcoal, paper, concrete, cast glass, polycaprolactone thermoplastic, silicone, and glass investment molds. This is a wide variety of materials but each, to varying degrees, has narrative function. Let me start by describing and assigning this to the materials found at use in the Emissioner sculptures, that is, the three steel and light and mirror sculptures which illuminate the entire exhibition. First, narratively, the Emissioner sculptures are designed to be kind of overwrought apparatuses for which to observe the drawings in the exhibition room, directly, but also to view everything else with a relationship to The Shake. Why exactly the light must first bound off a mirror to reach the drawings is left unsaid, but it is meant to imply that to view and evaluate The Shake, machinery and the manipulation of light are necessary. As the material goes, the bulk of these Emissioner sculptures are of mild steel. I decided to leave the steel basically alone — no surface treatment or even grinding off the mill scale. Just as with the shorthand notation of the writings beside the artworks, I wanted the no-frills, straight-from- the-yard steel to imply a haste with which the Humankind of the story employed in getting the machines built.

Another reason for doing this is so the viewer identifies them as steel, and has no doubt whether the metal is, say, aluminum or titanium or wrought iron, for example. The screens within them are made of fiberglass braid and a layer of epoxy resin. Here, the materials are not so immediately identifiable, at least not by all, and the absence of universal identification is important in that, while the Emissioner sculptures’ creation can be assigned to Humankind, there are other pieces on exhibition that do not so outwardly descry their material origin — as such they commune more closely with alien origins, tied up with the processes and behaviors of The Shake. Then, I hope to mean, that these resin screens come across as a necessary implementation of some unearthly material, a hide or a rendered fat or a gathering of some secretion, so that only by pouring light through it can The Shake be adequately observed. All said these apparatuses are used to observe the drawings — labeled, Speculations. Though as much as these viewing machines are symbolic of the narrative, they also function literally: indeed, if they were not present, the gallery would be completely dark.

I’ll speak now about the five drawings. As just said, they are labeled Speculations and subtitled, The Shake [I-V]. Being so-called, it would not be wrong to assign these drawings also by the hand of Humankind, and again so by their easy identification as charcoal on paper. I’ll describe each drawing. CREATOR shows a cluster of three ovoid forms, two are caged in a bonelike mesh while the third is free and separating pieces of itself from the whole. It is a sequence of uncontainment and separation. It is, though, an object — insentient. Think, for example, how a nebula is to a star. EMISSION is a view of an empty room and a cluster of barbed cords reaching from one wall to the other, like a shaft of light pouring in from a high window. This is the initial puncture into our realm from The Shake’s. The cords being barbed is crucial, as it denotes the irretrievability of this action — it can go in but it cannot go back out. CONJOINING RITE shows two ovals sinking into one another with a bonelike arch sat overtop the overlapping moment. This represents a marriage of one thing unto another, in this instance of The Shake’s amorphous and immaterial nature with the physicality of our own — and perhaps more precisely a calcification of The Shake unto matter, albeit vaporous and nearly intangible. ISTHMUS is a drawing of the same empty room as in EMISSION, but the path of the barbed cords is instead replaced with an opened pathway from a window to the opposing wall. Could possibly be called a thoroughfare, established. In accordance with EMISSION’s pathfinder, ISTHMUS is the path. Finally, CANTONMENT is a drawing of three towers, though highly abstract and imbued with the same bonelike structure as present in both CREATOR and CONJOINING RITE. This drawing is symbolic of the finalization of the entity’s intrusion upon our realm.

Also here we have four holes. Meaning, the two plaster sculptures — The Punctures — and two casts of their wider surroundings, The Sockets — one in concrete and one in resin. On each of The Sockets I’ve adhered one glass sculpture — one is opaque black glass on the resin Socket and the other is opaque white glass on the concrete Socket. The cast glass sculptures I call Gift Casts; the purport of these Gift Casts being that, they are cast from the cavities of the Puncture sculptures, and indeed they are: the Gift Casts are perfect positives of the Punctures’ negatives. Thus, narratively, if The Punctures are the calculated removal of matter done at the hand of The Shake, the Gift Casts are, I call them, teleplastic photographs, cast by Humankind, so to give physicality to The Shake’s invisible actions. For a real world equivalent, think of how researchers will pour molten metals into termite mounds so they might display their arrays of tunnels. Moreover the Humankind of the story has dubbed these glassworks Gift Casts in a kind of hope that the ‘molds’ (The Punctures) made by The Shake are the beginning of a conversation or communication — but as in all things on exhibition here, such a thought as this is inconclusive and just hopeful speculation.

As for the concrete version, this Socket can be placed, without too much effort, as coming from our world — a cut-out from an industrial zone, but, taking the piece in formally, we can witness some strangeness: the walls of the concrete curve upwards, wrenched forward from their proper place, as if, in the moments during the extraction of The Puncture, this rigid stone is made again for a moment viscous, semi-cured, and malleable. As if the presence of the Puncture distorts the intrinsic natural characteristics of its surroundings. As if then, that The Shake itself may operate within rules outside our understanding of physics — if you will. As for the resin Socket, I employ resin for the same purposes as in the Emissioner screens, to invoke an alienness via resin’s rareness in everyday life, at least in comparison to something like concrete. The resin, when not immediately identifiable, can fold itself more swiftly into the theoretical reality of The Shake and the Phosphene story. So, the resin, if momentarily in the mind of the viewer is not- yet-resin, can be instead ectoplasm or some mysterious leakage emanating from the nameless properties of The Puncture. And if we take it in tandem with its concrete counterpart, and see that they are perfectly congruent in all ways but material, and if we witness those befuddling manipulations of the concrete and assign them to the powers of The Shake, then we might suppose that this resin Socket has entombed its Puncture for such a period of time that its walls itself are composed now more of this excreted substance than the stone of its original.

And at last we have two remaining sculptures, Plantlife and Glassware. Glassware is a plastic sculpture of the two halves of a chalice, fragmented, and set beside one another. Plantlife is a tall plastic sculpture whose familiarity to us is a good deal farther away — but the title should indicate that this piece is an imitation of some kind of vine or the stem of another bit of worldly flora, with foliage at the top and at the bottom. Ah, but — so much of this piece defies its title. I should remind you that each accompanying bit of writing beside each piece is extracted whole cloth from the narrative and as such must be challenged. Plantlife? Yes, maybe but I welcome you to ask yourself if you would identify it as such, taking it in as an artifact instead of an art object it may not strike you first as ‘plantlife.’ I ask you to regard it as an artifact because that is its life within the narrative but there is no denying that a viewer at an art show would perceive it more quickly as an artistic object, and if that is the case it might belong more readily to the lineage of abstraction as in Brancusi, or later on, Jean Arp or Henry Moore. And so be it — even in that sense I have a tingling feeling that a plant is not quite the first thing to spring to mind; I for one see in it a relationship to the human spine, with its flourish at the top stabbing forth to a brain, and the flourish at its base spanning into a pelvis and its contents, and secondarily, maybe, to the silhouette of a seabird, its beak upward at the sky. A stork maybe. But, while these interpretations are all well and good, I have imposed the fact of the Phosphene narrative onto it, Humankind declaring it Plantlife. And I assure you that Humankind’s interpretations of The Shake are without plentiful evidence, granting that at this moment their research is finite and new, and resounding with a hopefulness about The Shake, its amicability, that might be misplaced — though it is a hopefulness I wish would be employed should we ever encounter such an unearthly thing as The Shake.

But finally we are given a touchstone, a pivot point, in the discovery of Glassware. It is so exceptional a discovery because it is without a shadow of a doubt an imitation of our own world’s things. Seemingly, an attempt by The Shake to outright mimic some aspect of our world, and in particular a drinking receptacle — a thing which mediates, lubricates, and deforms so much of our interaction with each other — so it points, it could be, to a notion that The Shake is noting it as an aspect of our own behavior. As simple as it is, formally, it is also the sole bit of conclusive evidence that The Shake is observing, if not outright imitating, us — which suddenly recasts the narrative’s upshot: that ———

Now, these drawings are speculative by nature. In one way they denote a possible way in which The Shake slipped from its realm into our own, in another way they operate as taxonomic representations of The Shake’s formal qualities — and within the narrative both can function as true, at once. On the plane of reality, here, where these drawings work in benefit of the gallery show, well, maybe their function is evident. They establish an aesthetic rubric by which we may regard the rest of work against. If they are sufficiently esoteric, biomechanical, and alien, then they serve as an umbrella over the rest of the exhibition, to cohere and activate the artworks around it.

These triplet sculptures — a Puncture, a Socket, and a Gi& Cast — mark the initial discovery of The Shake. The Puncture being where The Shake interacts physically with our world — though the interaction is subtractive — the Gift Cast our method of communing with this discovery of The Shake, and the Socket being the wider setting from which the Puncture was wrenched from, giving it a past and a place. There is a pair of these triplets to indicate that there are multiple of these Punctures and likely more to be discovered, and subsequently other artifacts hidden about — this doubles as an indication of The Shake’s omnipresence and infinitude, that the state of its physical being is limitless, or at least that it is itinerant and roaming. One Socket is made of concrete and the other is made of resin: concrete, like steel, is a ubiquitous and identifiable material, clock-able by anyone as concrete; resin less so, and its presence here mirrors its presence in the Emissioner sculptures. Why these materials then?

Plantlife is made from thermoplastic, a stark, zinc-white material. Not unlike the resin found elsewhere in the show, I can’t help but see in this material an inherent distance from the flora and fauna we have observed for millennia. Plastic itself is an invention of the 20th century, in the grand scheme of things an entirely new and mysterious thing. For this reason I chose to use it as a symbol of an alien material. So, if for a moment, you will accept it as such, what exactly do we have here in the sculpture Plantlife? Abiding by our rule of quote unquote ‘universal and ubiquitous' materials being human and worldly, then we can suppose that a material as strange as this is a product, to some degree, of The Shake. But how? We know from The Punctures that The Shake can subtract and more or less make a mold from our world so it’s not without sense to propose that these sculptures are casts of its own mold — and its chosen material being analogous to the foreign secretions as are represented by resin of the Sockets and Emissioners.