Think of a warm flickering, orange light, dim enough to catch the soft fuzz accumulating on my chin and lip. Low light illuminating a silver dewdrop glinting from your earlobe. Dark enough that our eyes slowly adjust and the shadows register a texture of neither here nor there. Looking for words to describe semidarkness, the thesaurus offers us a froth of descriptors with negative valences that tragically fail to convey how it feels to be enveloped in a glow achieved by looking through my own closed eyelids. Maybe it is like before being born? A state of potential. A movement toward more or less light. Away from a describable, identifiable category which will demarcate almost everything. A simulacrum which resists being shrugged off like a coat that is too tight in the arms.

Tami T’s chant: “It’s not your right to know. It’s our right to be.”

A return to objects’ intertwined materialities— against a romanticized dichotomy of constructed and the natural. Every new thing is also extracted and ancient; multifarious, reconstituted, historical, and mysterious; something fossilized, refined and processed; mineral pigment mixed and fixed with polymers.

Reserving the right to not know and not answer for the work is important to the practice— crucial.