Deeper Than Roses

October 29, 2024 Elizabeth Arzani

When I first told my family that I was moving to Portland, OR, my grandmother, a life-long east-coaster, and the only notable gardener in the family, shared a dream of hers that I had never heard before. She told me her younger self had dreamed of running away to Portland, because it is the city of roses.

Hollywood Neighborhood, 2021

Roses in my yard

Peninsula Park, Rose Garden, 2024

Hollywood Neighborhood, 2020

I had researched Portland for it’s art community, print shops, food, and graduate school options, but it wasn’t until I landed in Portlandia that I learned of the city’s notoriety for roses. From business logos and wall murals to daily dog walks in my neighborhood - or likely any neighborhood in Portland, roses are always emerging.

Sometimes they even grow through rooftops.

Portland’s rainy season and mildish (who knows anymore with climate change) year-round weather make for ideal conditions for roses. But roses are not native to the area. It was for the 1905 Lewis and Clark Centennial Exposition that over 10,000 rose bushes were planted around the city to attract visitors, resulting in the still-ongoing annual Rose Festival.

When my friend Broderick (Adé) Hogue died, roses became a symbol of him. In his honor, a portrait was recreated in rose petals, Lisa Congdon designed special edition rose pins, Specialist released bike kits fashioned in overlapping outlines of roses (also designed by Lisa), and at his celebration of life, we wrote memories on red paper and coiled them into paper roses. Because Broderick would always be the one to remind you to stop and smell the roses.

Our mutual friend, Amelia Caristo, read aloud a rose poem at his celebration. It was likely Tupac Shakur’s poem, “The Rose that Grew from Concrete.” Whenever her voice cracked or paused to hold back tears, I cried harder. I still cry. I’m crying as I write this.

Amelia sent me this image last year of the rose bush by her house that bloomed on October 29th.

October 29th, marks three years since Broderick left us, because he was hit by a car riding his bike. It is just as painful now as it was then. I still cycle between anger and sadness, and have moments of disbelief, where it is still hard to wrap my head around the fact that I can’t butt dial him anymore.

The last day I spent time with Broderick, was when I visited him in Chicago, a few months before the accident. He had just moved into a new apartment and had requested that I repair the assemblage that I had made him as a work trade almost a decade ago. The deal was artwork for help with revamping my website. He had surprised me with also designing my name for my website, which is still used as my header for anything professional that I need to send.

That day in his new apartment, he couldn’t find any clamps to hold the pieces in place once I had re-glued them, so I had to improvise and use cans of beans from his pantry to apply weight. I still remember him laughing at me and I remember wondering why he had such an impressive stock of beans.

A Musician's Repitoire_dyptych_18x24_Elizabeth Arzani.jpg

It was devastating to receive the repaired piece in the mail months later. I had meant to follow up with him to ask if the cans of beans had worked. They did. His family and Chicago based friends kindly sent the artwork to me across the country, but it was never supposed to hang on my walls.

I had hidden his initials in the work. As a designer, and someone who called themselves a letterer, I always thought it was a bit funny, that it took him over a year to realize this. When he called to ask if I did that on purpose (of course I did), he admitted that it was actually someone else who noticed the letters spelled his name and had pointed it out to him. Now the letters are all I can see.

I was reorganizing my closet recently, and found this artwork, what should still be his artwork, hidden at the back. I haven’t had the heart to face it - let alone fully unwrap them. It still hurts too much.

The year he passed, was the year I was writing my thesis in grad school. After many previous rejections to publish excerpts of this research and writing , I received my first acceptance letter a few weeks ago from a small publisher in Indiana to be included in their newest edition of Quotidian magazine. One excerpt, titled Grief, is written in the form of a diary. Saturday, October 30th, 2021 2:27pm - I received a call.

*The Curious Distance From Foot to Fingertip*, self-published limited edition risograph book, 2022

What it doesn’t say is that the call was from Carmen Neely, a mutual friend based in Chicago. What it also doesn’t say is that the first thing she said was: Where are you? You should sit down. I remember not listening. I remember I couldn’t sit down. I remember pacing - it being impossible to sit still, because deep down, I knew what she was going to say before the words came out of her mouth. Her breathing, her tone, even the way she said my name was different. It was serious. Defeated. Tired. And so so sad. I hated that she had to say it, but at the same time I needed to hear it.

I had the be the messenger too—the voice that verbally announced that someone you love is going to die. Gutted doesn’t even begin to describe it. Somehow you muster the strength to do the impossible, only because your love is stronger than your grief. Your grief is a form of love.

Grief is piles, clutter, overcrowded extension cords, ink smeared from a leaky fine-tipped pen, an expandable hose stretching and shrinking itself from the spigot.

Grief is also roses. Now, every year instead of not sending Broderick a holiday card, I send his family and friends a rose themed card. The only thing I’ve found to help with grief is to share it. To share memories and to let others know the person they love is still loved by you too.

I miss you friend

The Adé Hogue Foundation has been created to honor and continue Adé’s legacy. The foundation is dedicated to supporting the BIPOC community, underprivileged youth, and supporting Adé’s passions such as cycling and running as well as the educational pursuits for creatives.

A Memorial Scholarship Award has been created in his name. The Broderick Adé Hogue Memorial Scholarship Award will be given to UNC Charlotte students, majoring in Graphic Design or Studio Art, with a demonstrated commitment to promoting opportunities for Black, Indigenous, or People of Color. You can make donations here.

To Pick Up Words from the Ground Never Opened

October 7, 2024 Elizabeth Arzani

How many ‘nevers’ have you told yourself? These are the ‘I can’t’ statements or the ‘I will never’ thoughts that permeate beliefs and inform behaviors. The stems of self doubt. A self imposed never stops you before you have the chance to start.

Rick Ruben, record producer and founder of Def Jam Records wrote about this in his book, The Creative Act: A Way of Being. He lists never statements under the heading: thoughts and habits not conducive to the work. The work being: creativity.

Pages 138-139 from *The Creative Act: A Way of Being* by Rick Ruben

Ironically, before reading Ruben’s new(ish) book, I fought hard against my own self imposed rule: never go to a book club if you haven’t read the book. Hesitantly, I picked apart the word, ‘never,’ taking the letter ‘n’ away, but keeping ‘ever’ —at any time. At all times; always. In any way.

I showed up with my barely opened copy. Sitting in a circle under a shaded tree in the park, I found myself next to a very indexed version of underlined and dog-eared pages and by the just-finished book, across from the admittedly half-way there book. Regardless of our re-read or not-yet-read pages, we found that we had all arrived at the same vulnerable feeling: we are never doing enough.

Inspired, I returned to the park to keep reading.

We took turns reading chapters out loud to each other

Never statements are lonely and rarely admitted out loud. Why is this? Why is it is so much harder to say I am enough and believe it?

Ruben identifies habits—our movements, speech, thought, and perception as pathways carved into our brains, functioning autonomously and automatically. It is painful, awkward, and uncomfortable to unlearn or to create a new behavior or habit, or to even recognize when one is no longer serving you.

For my latest two person exhibition, Recieving Space with Owen Premore at Souvenir gallery this past September, I showed a new series of works on paper that initiated with the phrase: to pick up words from the ground never opened.

This phrase recounts the time I found fragmented letter forms lying on the ground in a field while out for a run.

Collection of letter forms stuffed in my pockets

The happenstance of stopping to notice waterlogged cardboard pieces that had dislodged themselves from an obscure site-specific cement sculpture a few yards away gave me the immediate feeling of being right where I should be. It was random that I happened to be running. Yet, being in a small town for a month at an artist residency without a car led me to attempt to explore a new place on foot.

Just as Ruben described the importance of creating sustainable rituals to support creativity, he also notes that inspiration is hidden in the most ordinary moments and the possibilities that emerge when you are able to stay open and pay close attention.

Inspiration - #29 out of 78 areas of thought from *The Creative Act: A Way of Being* by Rick Ruben

Curious, I collected as many torn cardboard pieces as my pockets could hold, imagining all the words they might have said. It may sound silly, but truthfully I’ve been thinking about these little scraps of paper for over a year. Previously they have served as my starting point for plaster molds and ceramic sculptures, but most recently, I’ve been using them as material for writing, weaving, and printmaking.

And so, I typed to pick up words from the ground never opened several times across many pages before slicing the printed text into one inch strips and weaving them back together. Each letter form undulated in an over and under pattern to arrive at one interlocking structure. Opened intertwined with never.

Scanning my woven words allowed me to digitally cut and crop, zoom in and out, further reducing each word to isolated islands or fragmented fields. They became a new field of flat color whenever the digital scan was translated back into a physical material with ink squeegeed through the stenciled mesh of a screen and printed on paper.

The more each new found shape obscured it’s root in language as I screen printed layer upon layer, I found myself missing the in-between moments. Moments of almost reading or noticing the seemingly familiar. The space where words feel slippery or hard to distinguish after letters have been crammed in my pockets or displaced in a field near the woods.

I wanted to get back to the moment where something about a fragmented form of a lost letter compelled me to stop and look closer.

Collecting found fragments is simultaneously about what remains just as much as it is about what was is lost.

Fragments emphasize the negative space, the we-know-not-whats, the silences—the holes. It might be the beginning of a love letter; words held dearly until they became tattered from wear and tear. Or the opposite, the words we let go—unspoken, ignored, swallowed whole, never opened.

This same sentiment is applied to my wall sculptures, tin collages or assemblages presented in this show. This year marks ten years of tinkering (on and off) with Bill Herberholtz’s gifted collection of vintage and salvaged tin.

Just like how I found the fragmented letter forms in the field, Bill’s collection was given to me in bits and pieces.

*The Curious Distance from Foot to Fingertip*, 2022

Sometimes it took years for me to identify the origin of a material after spotting it in it’s original function out in the world.

These pieces are your old containers, retro dollhouses, trunks, signage, toys and trains. Seeing only parts of the whole, made me pay close attention to the specificity of color and the mark making made by rust and usage. They were my clues to the life of these objects.

Prior to our two-person exhibition, Owen and I had never met. We worked asynchronously from our respective studio corners, introducing ourselves over phone calls, wishing each other luck as our deadline approached. It was Owen’s description of his 'Heavy Time’ series as absurd, noisy, unexpected, a series of humorous contraptions that piqued my interest the most.

Hearing about his process of seeking out strange combinations of material and sound, inspired me to revisit my own strange collections of material at hand.

From my notes taken during our conversations, I circled the word absurdity and drew arrows linking the material of found objects to the experience of way too much information all at once. This experience was a reference to the heaviness of the times—COVID, stress, and cyclical media as being hard to process individually and all together absurd.

When I asked what kind of sounds his sculptures made, Owen shared there was one with multiple metronomes that recorded on the “tick” and played back on the “tock” resulting in what he described as an “out-of-sink static or glitchy sound”.

While I didn’t quite follow all the mechanics or engineering involved, I gleaned that the sounds emitted from his crystal radios would be even more elusive since they pick up different stations or noise depending on their location and proximity to other variables.

At one point during the opening reception, I saw people tuned into each radio or sculpture either by foot pedal, knob, or touching a coiled antenna.

It was a conglomeration of low hums, beeps, a click click, a high noted sharp squeal, a marble rolling, a ding, a buzz, a bang, followed by steady static and a short burst of a fuzzy radio station with muffled voices. Each arrangement of sounds would be different each time I visited the gallery.

Installation view of Receiving Space, September 2024 at Souvenir

Shown together in Receiving Space, our work transmitted varying levels of visual and auditory noise: the miscommunications, beyond-known-sciences, the paranormal, and the unknown. Here, even silence felt loud.

Huge thank you to Doug Burns, director of Souvenir for supporting this exhibition.

Pocket Full of Memory

September 3, 2024 Elizabeth Arzani

For the first time in over a decade, I physically retraced the routine. I detailed this childhood ritual in the first paper I submitted in college. Regrettably, the original essay is lost somewhere in an old folder or file, but the title, Quarters & Mints is etched in my memory; sharped by its sound and smell.

Stories of the routine pay tribute to my late grandfather, William Randall Harris III, who was known to friends as Randy, but to family as Pop. One week every summer, like clockwork, my sister and I would fight over who was first out the door to accompany Pop on his daily walk to retrieve the newspaper—it was me. Pop made this five minute morning stroll from the beach condo to the front desk one of my favorite childhood memories.

Some things never change.

It took two delayed flights, a bad experience at the Thrifty Jacksonville Airport rental counter and a one hour drive in a rented Kia Soul in a late afternoon thunderstorm for me to finally return to Jekyll Island, GA. The Villas by the Sea condos are no longer painted brown, but the former family condo number 233 is still there. Up the stairs and to the right, but the red door is now blue.

The routine was a slow meander through side paths dodging the elaborate webs of banana spiders (the really big ones). Imagine two little girls skipping alongside their grandfather to the hum of cicadas and the many many bugs that creep and crawl in the sticky, humid heat typical of summertime in southern Georgia.

The front desk and cafe were in the same location albeit with different operating hours. While it was disappointing to discover that the cafe no longer served breakfast, I was most disheartened by the disappearance of the game room and missing pinball machine that would have been tucked in the back corner. I always imagined returning with a pocket full of quarters to play one more game. Pop’s pockets always jingled with quarters—enough for a newspaper, a few rounds of pinball and my favorite, a York pepermint patti.

The upgrade was the saddest little enclosed room, empty sans a computer, unused desk, fax machine, and a trashcan (also empty). The vibrancy of a mini arcade with flashing lights, vending machines, and the spring loaded sounds of bouncing balls were all painted over, replaced by the grim silence of barren white walls behind locked doors.

My mom picked up a free local paper that was on a nearby table next to the travel and tour brochures. And that too, was just as depressing.

The end of the routine was always a pit stop by the pool to dip our toes in and test the temperature of the water. Here, the upgrades improved the pool and added extra seating areas. I bypassed the locked fence, and dipped my toes in, imagining my younger self getting excited for the day ahead.

This is the part of the routine, where Pop would ask for a water report, as if asking “what is the weather like today?” I found the water nostalgic and the weather bittersweet.

As the bugs continued to bite, we ventured on, sweating our way past the parking lot and the new plastic playgrounds to find Driftwood Beach. My sister looked for the sign she remembered to have said “8th most romantic beach”, but we couldn’t find it.

Found in the archives

We did find the familiar fossilized, dead trees, uprooted or half buried, scattered along the sandy shores—the same ones that I spent my childhood climbing. When I was younger, I thought these strange gnarled trees were a result of some kind of catastrophic storm, most likely a hurricane. But the real cause of what my grandmother refers to as the ‘petrified forest’ is decades of erosion.

Although on this particular visit, shortly after hurricane Debby, we did learn that bones had been found on the beach. Archeologists were excavating the bones, ruling out human remains, to identify an old horse, which they estimated to be over 12,000 years old. These bones were thought to have submerged as a result of the most recent storm.

I had just finished reading Christine Lai’s debut novel, Landscapes, where the main character is an archivist attempting to record what is left of a collection of art, books, and other ephemera amidst a crumbling estate in an apocalyptic future. Throughout the book each loss is carefully categorized:

Toning and wear along the edges. Imperfections due to moisture. Damaged by mold. Fragile condition; affected by damp and pests. Extensive worming throughout, obscuring portions of the text.

A quote by Louise Bourgeois found at the beginning of *Landscapes* a novel by Christine Lai

The novel also begins with a prologue about the nineteenth-century English painter, J. M. W. Turner, noting his decision to record ‘the wreckage of the old fortress’ rather than Ehrenbreitstein’s reconstruction. In an interview with Amanda Paige Inman about Lai’s themes on archive and ruin, Lai shares that she associates ruins with the idea of rebuilding rather than despair or dystopia; connecting ruination to romantics.

“The flowers and the weeds that grow through the ruins, they’re symbols of hope.”
Christine Lai on Archives, Ruins & her Debut Novel Landscapes

The landscape of spindly branches and sideways trees with woven roots, emerging and disappearing beneath the sand and sea are hauntingly beautiful and ruin-esque. Here, loss is textured. Sun-bleached trees exhibit a collection of weathered surfaces, sculpted by wind and water. Each tree is it’s own archive:

Riddled with holes. Peeling. Curling and coiling. Gaps and grooves with deep valleys and indentions throughout. Waterlogged. Bent, buried, and bare.

I was only in Jekyll Island a few days, but I returned to Driftwood Beach multiple times. In the morning, mid-day, high and low tide. It was surprisingly comforting that the former maritime forest known today as Driftwood Beach had remained the same as it was in my childhood memories. But I wonder, what will be left to find in the next hundred years?

What do you find when you return to your childhood memories?

Timing is funny

July 8, 2024 Elizabeth Arzani

Alphabetical Diaries, by Shelia Heti was recommended to me by artist and printmaker, Alyson Provax during a studio visit last year. Of course the book was not actually published until February of this year, but Alyson had emailed me a link to the precursor, New York Times article, “A dairy in alphabetical order: A to C” to read during the interim.

Both the article and the book are exactly as their titles suggest—sentences plucked from old diaries arranged alphabetically.

Alyson Provax in collaboration with Zach Clark, *Like things go away*, 72 page artist book, risograph printed in Steel, Moss, & Black on French and Prang papers with letterpress cover, stitch bound. Edition of 200, 6 x 6.25 in., National Monument Press, 2023, with no. 32 in my personal collection and photographed above.

Admittedly, I haven’t read either the article or the book in their entirety. Yet, I am fascinated by their premise and the idea of uncovering patterns hidden in personal archives.

“A book about how difficult it is to change, why we don’t want to, and what is going on in our brain. A book can be about more than one thing, like a kaleidoscope, it can have many things coalesce into one thing, different strands of a story, the attempt to do several, many, more than one thing at a time, since a book is kept together by its binding. A book like a shopping mart, all the selections…A book that is a game.”
Sheila Heti, Alphabetical Diaries, the first few lines of chapter A, pg 6

What would I learn if I tried this? I know I don’t have the patience or time to alphabetize 500,000 words from a decade’s worth of journals like Heti. But what if I took the last sentence from each notebook entry I logged in the last year? What patterns could I find about my self?

A Papier Tigre notebook entry from Wednesday, February 21st 2024, 7:27 am. The last sentence here would be: *Lines peeking and extending past, but my mind connects them, filling in the absent details.*

From January - December 2023, I chronologically listed thirty-six last sentences. To my surprise, I found questions were immediately answered by the following sentence. And the answers weren’t wrong. They were strikingly correct.

A series of entrances and exits: absences and presence.[1]
All this hard work and I can make or break it in the final step.
“…specific questions useful in different situations, examples: what is the question no one is asking?”[2]
How much time do we give our search of color, texture, and form living in harmony?
All I can see at times when we fight.
Getting out of a loop.[3]
“These sentences—they will begin having already been sentences somewhere else and this will mark their afterlife, and this will be their debut.”[4]
I was so uncomfortable I didn’t say what I saw.[5]
What is surrounding my periphery and falls into research.
For a moment, the sound of insects stopped, then started buzzing even louder.[6]
Is one way of being better than the other?
“Imagine the line as a load-bearing wall.”[7]
“Who knows what else I’ve hidden in there because I could make no sense of it at the time and found nowhere else to put it.”[8]
Going to bed upstairs past midnight.
He calls ‘the beast’ his brother when he is drunk.
“…dappled with sun and shadow.”[9]
Rigmarole is an interest in the possibilities embedded in miscommunication.
A load of soggy pinks droop at the pit of the bottom while the other machines vibrate too fast for me to look.
Forms of touch.
And proceeds to clean up the puke, yelling that he has to do everything.
Question: what is a rigmarole?
In many ways it feels like a metaphor for my relationship right now—the rigmarole of rupture and repair.
Not just of routine and comfort.
“It amasses a body through the collection of simple movements.”[10]
How do you feel?
I feel more strained in our relationship than I’ve ever felt.
How are words received and where do they land?
“…slow scribble, reciprocity.”[11]
Saying my truth and how I feel and what I want without judgement/upsetting feelings.
And I am still avoiding the last few questions of the sexual communication part I questions. [12]
“The shape of holding my words together.”[13]
Yet, social media doesn’t feel good for my mental health.
I feel very lonely today.
Everything would be in jeopardy.
In our matching raincoats.
“A yellow that dirties easily, exhausted at being asked to smile and be happy.”[14 ]

Timing is funny that way.

Shortly after our studio visit, Alyson and I elected to pair ourselves, submitting my ceramic vessels in conversation with her letterpress works as a response to The Vestibule’s open call prompt: time.

We proposed that our varied methods of printmaking, writing, and constructing mimic the slipperiness of language as simultaneously stiff and malleable. Recorded in material choices like clay, ephemeral papers, and selected text, language and time are mapped, molded, and manipulated. Paired together, our collective words and phrases straddle between legible and illegible. Our central theme being language is a paradox— both an elusive and exacting timekeeper.

Now, six years after having first encountered Alyson’s intimate works as a large scale billboard while living in Seattle, I will be returning to exhibit alongside Alyson as well as Karey Kessler, and Tara Tamaribuchi at the Seattle Art Fair, collaboratively co-curating a booth with The Vestibule gallery July 25th-28th.

Timing is funny that way.

[1] Melanie Cooper Pennington’s Climb In and Back Out Again, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iClbDcldYLY

[2] On Being with Krista Tippett, “Amanda Ripley Stepping out of the ‘zombie dance’ we’re in , and into ‘good conflict’ that is, in fact, life-giving,” https://onbeing.org/programs/amanda-ripley-stepping-out-of-the-zombie-dance-were-in-and-into-good-conflict-that-is-in-fact-life-giving/

[3] Esther Perel and Mary Alice Miller, “Letters from Esther #43: Would you rather be right or be married?,” https://www.estherperel.com/blog/letters-from-esther-42-would-you-rather-be-right-or-be-married

[4] Renee Gladman and Zoë Hopkins, NSE #765 (the new social environment), The Brooklyn Rail, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tRtdORElosk

[5] A man was masturbating on a park bench in front of the church

[6] Hiroko Oyamada, The Hole, translated by David Boyd, New Directions Publishing, New York, NY, 2020

[7] Lara Mimosa Montes, Thresholes, Coffee House Press, Minneapolis, MN, 2020

[8] Heidi Julavits, The Folded Clock A Diary, Double Day, 2015, pg 33-34

[9] Anne Truitt, Daybook: The Journal of an Artist, Penguin Books, 1984, pg 233.

[10] Brittany Mojo, “Accumulative Time,” Studio Potter, August 1st, 2023, https://studiopotter.org/accumulative-time

[11] Sheila Hicks, Weaving as Metaphor, edited by Nina Stritzler-Levine; With Arthur C. Danto and Joan Simon, Megan Mesloh’s signed copy

[12] Esther Perel, Rekindling Desire, The Basics Part 1: Understanding Eroticism

[13] Renee Gladman, Calamities, Wave Books, Seattle, WA, 2016

[14] Dawn Cerny, Les Choses: Dawn Cerny in Conversation with Catharina Manchanda, Seattle Art Museum Artist Spotlight, April 29th,2021, paraphrasing a quote by Dawn Cerny answering my question about the use of the color yellow

Ordinary Notes Multiply

January 19, 2024 Elizabeth Arzani

Christina Sharpe wrote the words: these ordinary notes multiply.

In a series of 248 notes, which could also be calculated as 261 notes if you were to count her selection of self titled beauty-everyday photographs as each holding a note of their own. She describes her photography as a collection of “flowers, trees, the light, clouds, the sky, moss, water, many things, in order to try to insist beauty into [her] head and into the world.” These notes as photographs appear as the ending, concluding the section: viii. to notice or observe with care.

A pile of books read and notes taken while snowed in over the weekend.

Sharpe’s collection of words and photographs, a body of observations with care, form the book, Ordinary Notes, published last year in April 2023.

In an interview with Jenna Wortham for The New York Times Magazine article, “The Woman Shaping a Generation of Black Thought,” Sharpe asks “how do we find the words and grammars we can live in?”

A screenshot from the tab I’ve kept open, so I don’t lose access by hitting my limited free reading quota. (A note about pay walls).

Sharpe is poignantly talking, writing, and living an accumulation of notes that shape Black life and ways of Black being. And as a white woman it is important that I take notes.

I find her notes, vital, historical— gut punching and painful. They are persevering notes mixed with joy, nostalgia, and celebration. Heart warming notes on love and the hands that hold them. Here, collecting, recording, listing, and photographing take alternating forms of care, grief, and loss, but make visible beauty as a method.

“I’ve been thinking about what beauty as a method might mean or do: what it might break open, rupture, make possible and impossible”

Note 51, page 79

Last weekend and continuing into this week, a beautiful blanket of snow, but mostly sinister ice covered up the city of Portland (OR). Powerful gusts of wind knocked down trees and power lines; rendering it impossible, rather dangerous and irresponsible to keep the gallery and my two-person exhibition with Renee Couture open for business as usual.

Installation view of *Covered Up in Dailiness,* featuring Elizabeth Arzani and Renee Couture, January 2024, documentation by Marcio Gallucci Studios

The irony of a show with a title, Covered Up in Dailiness, also becoming obscured and covered up by something as daily as weather in the winter was not lost on me.

Covered up in snow, Saturday, January 13th 2024

Instead of gallery sitting, I spent the weekend under blankets, returning to Renee Gladman’s book, Calamities. Where I began each of her essays with her repeated phrase, I began the day with.

I begin (most) of my days with writing in the form of a list of connected or disparate thoughts—quickly scribbled into somewhat legible notes.

“I began the day having given myself the task of compiling a list. I wanted to see whether I could trace all the problems—large and small…rather I wanted to document the questions that led to writing.”
Calamities, page 5

It was this time last year that I began each day of January focusing on (w)hole studies; researching relationships between text and clay—the project of an artist residency. As part of this study, I took a years worth of accumulated notes, and curiously reviewed what happens in a year that I deemed worthy of noting.

What didn’t I note?

redacted notes - continued edited copy.jpg

I wondered, if it was possible to read my notes in a new way? Would I be able to find anything hidden inside? Did my ordinary notes multiply?

Looking for holes, I began line by line, selecting words in the order in which they appeared on the page. Words revealed against their redacted sentences shape-shifted the past in the present, forming a collection of erasure poems.

Detail of *Monday (to admit),* Elizabeth Arzani, 2023, documentation by Mario Gallucci Studios

There is no one way to create an erasure poem. Erin Dorney presents: crossout, computer, cut out, covered up, retyped and visual as variations on form categorized in the blog post,“6 Styles of Erasure Poetry.”

Presented in my exhibition with Couture, I used screen printing, collage, and hand-built ceramics as methods to cross out, cut out, cover up, rewrite, reprint, remold and make visible the beauty of a line.

The morning the show opened, I spent some time covered up in my own observations.

January 6th 9:02 am, I noted:

pipes covering tree roots (memories of entanglement)
wire wrapped tubes covering absence (spray painted blue)
a tree stump also covered blue (found chopped and discarded at a neighbor’s curb)
letters covering shelves in small nooks and crannies, spilling out onto the floor (where do our words go when they are lost?)
branches turned upside down in the shelf (a stomach, an inside suspended, a limbo, reaching, wanting, yearning for touch—to take root)

Notes (continued):

flattened words covered in layers, repeated out of order (whispered underneath, softly, asking a memory to remember, to hold it dear)

three dimensional words covered in fragments, disintegrating, cracking, illegible (words that ask you to read by walking around them)
pedestals covered in domesticity, furniture holding a capsule of stories shelved (recycled souvenirs sentimental to former selves)
phrases repeated cover up time, reflect a time, diminish time, question time, talk to time (the time I cried while I blow dried my hair, looking in the mirror, I saw my tears evaporate from my cheeks)
grief circulating time and mincing words, slipping in and out of a room subtly, abruptly, loudly (and quietly)
color painted over texture covering the simultaneity of a day filled with multitudes

I noted Couture’s work after viewing it in person for the first time:

structures held together by single screws (is this motherhood?)
skeletal ladders, posts, boxes without walls, stairs without steps (interior outlines of a home holding a body )
a large body of small undulating, hypnotic, mesmerizing lines (mediations of clouds, the sea, the sky above and fields on fields on fields below)
moments of time (encapsulating thin paper, draped, exhausted, held on by t-pins)
the color of prescription pills (pale pinks, minty greens, sky blues)
faces obscured in embrace (heads on a pillow, legs in the bath or cheeks kissed)
collaboration of marks (the complexity of mother and daughter)

While I was still making the work for this exhibition, I was reading, Motherhood, by Sheila Heti. Grateful for a book about not knowing if you want to be a mom, written by a childless woman in her late 30s. This year I go from being a childless woman in my mid 30s to a woman in my late(r) 30s.

Heti begins her book with a note about how “flipping three coins is a technique used by people who consult the I Ching, a divination system that originated in China over three thousand years ago. Kings used it in times of war, and regular people used it to help them with life problems.”

*Flipping three coins on a desk. Two or three heads—yes. Two or three tails—no.*

Does it really matter how I’m feeling?
no
No, no I didn’t think so. So many feelings in a day…What’s a better thing to steer your life by? Your values?
yes
Your plans for the future?
no
Your artistic goals?
no
The things the people around you need—I mean, the things the people you love need?
yes
Security?
no
Adventure?
no
Whatever seems to confer soul, depth and development?
no
Whatever seems to bring happiness?
yes
Motherhood, page 11-12

Written on Wednesday, December 13th 7:57am:

Motherhood as a theme keeps resurfacing. Within twelve days of each other, two friends in their thirties, both living in a different country than me, gave birth. While here, in the same city as me, another friend in their thirties was diagnosed with cervical cancer and had a radical hysterectomy. I wrote these notes down the morning before I went to see her in the hospital, still questioning what brings me happiness.

I take pictures of the sky and color of leaves on the days when my friends give birth and I can’t be there. (Polaroids above are for Jil & Samuel)

Couture’s work pulls from the many (small, big) moments of motherhood, with its romantic imagery and contradicting reality. Where time is held together by bursts of flimsy starts and abrupt stops.

Days swallowed whole, filled with lines that have neither a beginning nor an end—leaving only a brief space in-between, a hole to pause and hear the sound of a deep breath: inhale, exhale. Repeat.

Installation view, *Covered Up in Dailiness,* Elizabeth Arzani and Renee Couture, Carnation Contemporary, January 2024, documentation by Mario Gallucci Studios

Motherhood or not, both our repetitive routines and patterns comment on our respective everyday, noting the complexity of loving and wanting to be loved in return.

And while the gallery remained closed, I finished all three books.

Noted & underlined:

time we are seeing
the soul of time
so many feelings in a day
the cause of the stars in the sky
a secret I keep from myself
keen to kill an afternoon
lay your hands on reality
worries over paths not taken
a loose ends feeling
hiding in your voice
catching a breath
not there
nooks and crannies of the soul
there is never an end to holding
the pain that opens the door

(Heti)

//

an empty flaming room
two words at a time
closed quotes
i opened the quotes again
map a problem of space
can you translate problems into lines
something without edges
a picture-feeling
to think in paragraphs with a single sentence
the shadows said so
writing that also drew
un-alphabetic
endmatter

(Gladman)

///

held by a note
note to take hold
i felt i knew it
wounding work
listen to what i did not say
this telling
try daily
the space of weeks
hidden in air
a different note
gesture: a bodily grammer
not not sadness
dear, dearer still
time and untimes
(Sharpe)

Weather permitting, the gallery will be open the last two weekends of January and by appointment. We will also be giving an artist talk, moderated by Jay Ponteri on Saturday, Janaury 27th at 1pm. Please join us for this in person, free event.

And thanks to Alan Viramontes, if you missed the artist talk, you can watch the recording below.

What is covered up in your dailiness?

Rigmarole: A Short Summer Showing

August 21, 2023 Elizabeth Arzani

Installation view of *rigmarole,* photo courtesy of Simone Fischer

The month of August has been a collection of short summer showings, at least for 1122 Outside, a backyard gallery in the SE Tabor neighborhood of Portland, OR.

Substituting the traditional white walled cube for a fenced in lot, this alternative gallery sits behind the house of poets and educators Jen Denrow and Jesse Morse. As a living, activated space co-run by Denrow and her cousin Lauren Wallig, a backyard becomes an invitation for artists to be imaginationists.

Steadfast in our scheming, ahuva s. zaslavsky and I met weekly, collaborating together for the first time, under the fire of a fast approaching deadline, eager to respond to the site specific nature of a gallery lined with trees, between a chicken-less coop, fire pit, shed, and a covered carport.

As two makers with shared mediums, whose interdisciplinary work spans writing, printmaking, ceramics and more, our forms and concepts compliment one another in repeating and twisting tubular forms.

At the bottom of a shared list; a living document of ideas titled, TUBES, I wrote the word: rigmarole and the question, is this a real word?

I want to spell rigmarole: rig-a-marole, but Google says there is only one a.

At the opening of LULL, the two-person exhibition by Jenn Sova and Sarah Umles, the first to debut in the gallery’s summer series of showings*, Denrow asked me how do you say this word?

Rig-uh-muh-role or Rig-muh-rouwl?

rigmarole (n.)

"a long, rambling discourse; incoherent harangue," 1736, apparently from an altered, Kentish colloquial survival of ragman roll "long list, roster, or catalogue" (c. 1500). The origins of this are in Middle English rageman "document recording accusations or offenses," also "an accuser" (late 13c.).Aug 25, 2021

-Online Etymology Dictionary

If you deep dive into the Did You Know section of the online Merriam Webster dictionary there are disputes over the origin and meaning of rigmarole.

Is it the colloquial survival of ‘ragman roll’ or a term referring to record keeping and taxation by a man named Ragimunde or is it a medieval game of verse—can it be all of the above?

For me personally, rigmarole is an interest in the possibilities embedded in miscommunication: the roundabouts, the meanders, the tangents, the lost in thoughts…where legible turns illegible and back again. Like the history of a word having so many conflicting meanings, rigmarole in and of itself documents what remains and gets lost over time.

In working together, ahuva and I noticed our collaborations and ways of making as their own rigmaroles: ping pong poetry, late night and early morning texts, and skill swapping—stretching. Making by way of a persistent trial and error; an insistence on making something work even when it feels as if the universe is taunting the question: how bad do you want this?

Although ping pong poetry is not a recognized category of writing, it should be. A dance of words across screens is not that unlike a ball crossing over a net, thrown back at you like a question asks for an answer.

“i edited our ping pong poem. what do you think?”

In a span of three weeks, ahuva and I bounced words back and forth, from our texts to our shared google doc to letters molded in clay, fired in kilns, printed type to paper and scribbled and scratched by hand until the words minced together.

Spanning five minutes, our collective writing became a three part poem stamped in clay; a stop motion animation narrated by Ash Good.

The video was made with the intention of being viewed in the conversation room, a retrofitted one person theatre attached to the back of a decommissioned chicken-less coop (initially constructed by time-based light artist Pam Hadley).

This is one in a series of three collaborative projects created for our summer showing.

The writing room, activating the shed two steps to the right of the one person theatre, is an interactive installation for visitors to create their own words in response to one another.

Entering the rust, clay colored room, two toned ceramic letters (an entire alphabet both capital and lowercase) hung in organized rows, sparkling in the filtered daylight. The walls became lined notebook pages with words nestled on shelves, appearing and disappearing. Sometimes reading:

#Taylor Swift was here
move come closer pop
ponder wonder
i love you mom and dad
lenny slays!
Uli & Alice
BUNNY
ok honey

Through the duration of the show, ‘sex’ changed to ‘sexy gurl’, with the y laying sideways, ‘fuck you’ became ‘freaky’ then ‘shaky.’ Nonsense words—orphaned letters, rearranged, spelled ‘go fiddle or ‘sucking…….out…..chomp’ split between three shelves.

Even by means of distant viewers of documentation photos, I received requests for words to be written.

If possible, will you add “deciduous” to one of the lines on the wall?

These requests accompanied emailed back stories:

When I was 41, I was reading The New Yorker Magazine. I was impressed by word combinations and how there were times when reading the words abruptly stopped me in my mind in its tracks.
The word DECIDUOUS did that to me. It made me think that if I had a gravestone or urn, just say, I’d ask for “she was as if deciduous” written on it.
I felt (feel) like a tree that stays the same: TREE, but periodically I shed things/ideas and new ones sprout. I “leaf” as I age, so to speak.

As a site specific installation situated outside, between a very tall tree and several short trees, the exhibition rigmarole is inherently ephemeral. A seasonal garden of sorts.

Our rambling garden greets visitors upon arrival to the right of the gated entrance. Here, my slipcast ceramic pipes suspend from underneath ahuva’s circular ceiling centerpieces (installed asymetrically) creating dimensional floating line drawings from different vantage points. Connected, but not.

In this artificial wonderland, ceramic pipes joined to ducting tubes, ask questions about the nature of systems closed, knotted, and open. Lining the floor, walls, and flirting with the foliage peeking through the cracks between the roof and the wall. Pipes deliver and receive as conductors; they flow all sorts of materials to both of their ends. But what happens when the pipe clogs?

In my experience, language, like plumbing infrastructures inevitably get clogged, systems unnoticed, until they break—reminding me that communication also requires routine maintenance.

rigmarole will be on view through Saturday, August 26th with open hours from 4-6pm.

Our closing reception will be

Friday, August 25th from 4-8pm

with an artist talk at 6pm.

And thanks to Caitlin Taber, if you couldn’t make the artist talk, you can view the recording below.

*Edit 8/28/23: Guava, a show with Bunny Presse was actually the first of the short summer of showings.

Two Found Sentences

June 19, 2023 Elizabeth Arzani

Written on an oversized Post-It board were a list of prompts. It was the third option, scribbled like a math equation that piqued my interest the most: a beginning + ending = middle.

This prompt was an invitation provided by artist and educator Elizabeth Malaska in her recent workshop: Advanced Studio Seminar with WildCraft Studio School. Given as a homework assignment to help six strangers practice discussing our artwork and uncovering the intentions behind our art practices; these suggestions for places to begin were meant to prepare us for our upcoming group critiques.

I was eager to approach the question of how to talk about my work with a writing exercise, especially one shaped as if it were a Venn Diagram, searching for how a middle could link a found beginning to a found ending.

Wednesday, March 29th 9:16 am

Testing out the prompt, I started with Olivia Laing’s book Funny Weather Art in an Emergency. I suppose I started here, because when I am lost, I instinctually turn to my bookshelf. Laing’s title that links the words funny, weather, and emergency felt like its own beginning + ending = middle.

Opening the book to a random page – pg. 159. With my eyes closed, I pointed. I landed on “…her decision to return home to her abusive family caused what [Sarah] Lucas describes as the ‘great schism’ of her mother’s psyche.” Dipping my toes in, I took only a section of this loaded sentence and began with cutting and cropping the phrase: to return home.

To return home—what and where is a home? Home is more than shelter. I want my home to be a place where love resides. I imagine it to be a cozy corner with a window view, nestled under a lamp, safe and warm between the cushions. Homes are made of multiple places, textures, and smells; places of memories, but these foundations can be disappointingly fleeting, unreliable or missing altogether. A home is a place of intimate rituals and habits—both those that you run from and those you embrace…I think both.

Sentence two is from Bluets by Maggie Nelson. I found page 67 with my eyes closed again and pointed to: “I think both the theatre and we ourselves have had enough of psychology.” (Artuad)

And with this I took only: I think both.

Curious, I switched the order of the books. Beginning now with Bluets, my first sentence is from page 5, “The most I want to do is show you the end of my index finger.”

The most I want to do is show you the end of my index finger. The end of a finger is a measurement, an approximation, a referential living scale of comparison, but also idiosyncratic with lines of patterns identifying who you are, what you point to, where you go, and what you touch. At the end of a fingertip is a visceral essay of years told.

Sentence two is from Funny Weather, page 73, the first sentence on the page: “Knives opens with a visceral essay about Wojnaronicz’s homelessness years: a boy in glasses selling his skinny body to the pedophiles and creeps who hung around Times Square.”

Is it possible for me to use the entire sentence? I recognize my inclination to crop and edit, untethering authors’ words from their original home in a sentence, plucked from the paragraph.

What came up for me with this exercise is the word: home. Home was mentioned in recent conversations about the importance of decorating the spaces where you live. The difference a rug makes in a room after two and a half years of living with bare floors exposed and naked. Now my feet finally feel the warmth of tufted textiles and I can begin to understand what J meant when she said:

“As artists, we are more sensitive to our surroundings.”

The late artist and AIDS activist, David Wojnarowicz had also resurfaced for me recently. On a day when I was feeling low energy, but my mind was still active, craving engagement, I found myself lying in bed, watching All The Beauty And The Bloodshed, a Nan Goldin documentary, featuring Wojnarowicz.

The camera framed his face to fill my laptop’s screen while he discussed the atrocities of AIDS and smoked cigarettes from inside his apartment. Before you are ready (although no one was or is ever ready), the scene shifts from the smoke in the air to Goldin mourning Wojnarowicz’s death.

These coincidences reiterated the purpose of this writing prompt as a chance and choice exercise. I chose the books, finding the pages by chance. I chose the words to crop from their sentences, but the sentences appeared by closing my eyes and pointing. The books I open and close, the people I converse with, and the documentaries I watch, all collect in my periphery and inevitably fall into my research.

Each of these chances are in step with my choices.

Throughout the workshop, Malaska emphasized paying attention to what fills our peripheries. For me this means returning to the writing of Moyra Davey and the phrase ‘the social life of a book.’ Much of Davey’s writing is finding connections between other writers’ sentences across time and past the page— where they exist in our day to day. Two found sentences are how books talk to each other.

Sometimes these peripheries are faraway conversations that question your memory. Like the time I found Heidi Julavits’ book, The Folded Clock: A Diary staring at me from the shelf at a local gallery that is also bookstore. The words ‘a folded clock’ felt familiar, as if they had previously been spoken, described to me as a recommendation of something I needed to read. I still don’t know if this was true or if I wished it to be. But by page 33, I began to trust that my memory had been correct when I read the author quoting a poem by Mary Ruefle—the same quote I had written down three years prior.

“An ordinary life was an obscure life, if we can extend the meaning of obscure to mean covered up by dailiness, glorious dailiness, shameful dailiness, dailiness that is difficult to figure out, that is not always clear until a long time afterward.”

Ruefle wrote the poem “I Remember, I Remember,” in 2012. Julavits wrote The Folded Clock: A Diary in 2015, quoting Ruefle’s poem under the subheading: July 16th. And on Tuesday, December 29th 2020 at 8:51 am, I wrote it down again. But just the day before on Monday December 28th at 10:18am, I also wrote the quote:

“Have you ever read a book at the right age on the right afternoon, in the right place at the right angle?”
Madness, Rack, and Honey, pg 185

Thursday March 30th – unknown time in the morning

Sentence one is taken from All About Love by bell hooks. Maybe if I take two sentences from the same book, I won’t feel the need to crop them? Each sentence is still collected with my eyes closed and my finger outstretched like I am playing the game of spinning a globe, wondering where I will randomly assign myself to travel next.

The truth is, far too many people in our culture do not know what love is. He tells me he loves me with an egg bagel sandwich or with tacos. It is a practiced ritual. Waking up each day, for years with a coffee and a kiss. Hiding a note in his luggage – a good luck wish for him to find in his pockets later. Love for me is a willingness to step outside of what is known in his world of dailiness and enter mine. To see me and what I do.

It is sharing a walk with the dog, stopping for a cappuccino and a croissant, wearing our stains and crumbs with laughter. Love for me is listening and giving my words back to me, handled carefully. For him, it is seeing a plan through, my presence felt from start to finish, but for me it is accepting and enjoying the detours. Acknowledging this meaningful link between perfect passion and perfect love from the onset of a relationship can be necessary inspiration that empowers us to choose love.

Ending with sentence two from page 179, which comes after bell hooks defines perfect passion versus perfect love.

Perfect passion: happens when we meet someone who appears to have everything we wanted to find in a partner. (We see what we want to see).

Perfect love: is when our passion gives us the courage to face reality, embrace our true selves.

Sunday April 2nd: 7:52 pm

Last week I went shopping for a surprise gift for a friend. The same friend that in my memory shared Julavits’ book with me many years before I found it without looking for it. Now in another local bookstore that is also a stationary store, I found the slim sized book, The Hole by Hiroko Oyamada.

Purchased in the afternoon, I had finished reading it by that evening. This time I didn’t close my eyes and point. I squinted and skimmed with my eyes to find the first sentence that stood out against the others.

I’m guessing no one told you about me. I don’t blame them. I probably wouldn’t either, but here I am. I am like the ants that reappear in the spring, crawling up your bathroom walls, sneaking under the towels or even in the bristles of your toothbrush. Even after you smell the ant’s smooshed body between your fingers the crawling feeling remains. I am there but I’m not. The same way the blue tape wrapped around the kitchen faucet was meant to be a temporary solution. Almost a year later, it is still there, sticking the button into place, keeping the water running.

I am like the unfinished to do list, buried, crumpled at the bottom of a coat pocket, written on a folded piece of paper. A partially crossed out to do list kissing an over chewed piece of gum, still soggy with spit. The ink smeared and the words no longer legible, maybe they never were. Together we remain lost in a closet, behind closed doors. I don’t blame them. I am the muddy shoes left in front of the door—a tripping hazard. The type of shoes you kick out of the way in annoyance as you walk by.

I am beginning to think that you only see me when you are forced to. I was wrong.

I never wrote down which page sentence two, “I was wrong,” came from, but for a short sentence, it was harder to place at the end than you might expect. It felt as if it should have been a beginning. Is an end any different than a beginning?

I found it strange that as ants began to infiltrate my house and my writing, they were also crawling across page 19-20 in the new book I was reading. Cristina Rivera Garza was narrating her visit to Azcapotzalco, one of the sixteen municipalities of Mexico City. A name which translated from the Nahuatl language means “place of anthills.” A name derived from the legend of the deity Quetzalcóatl, whose mission, after the formation of the Fifth Sun was to recreate humankind. Which meant that he had to enter Mictlán, the underworld or realm of the dead to collect the bones and skeletal remains as a way to rebuild. As I understand it, it is a creation story built on the backs of a small but disciplined army of ants.

On March 30th in a café in a neighborhood in NE Alberta shortly after 1pm

I was introduced to the book Liliana’s Invincible Summer, by Cristina Rivera Garza which was described to me as a search for justice for her sister’s murder through the act of collecting and rebuilding a missing archive. Similar to the way Davey arranges her disparate subjects under subheadings in her book Index Cards, Rivera Garza arranges her paragraphs under bracketed, lowercase subheadings like the one found on page 19:

[place of anthills]
“…the ants, which once crossed the border between life and death, slip through the skin now, linking the outside and the inside, history and event, myth and injury. A puncture. A crack…the ants climb the inner face of the body’s organs and, laboring against tissues and mucous membranes, advance steadily until they reach the most intimate crevices, the rifts. Collectors on the surface, predators under the ground. The ants have already colonized every corner of the planet and yet, clearly unsatisfied, they now travel through the lymphatic system, the large intestine, the very fine network of veins and arteries, the hidden side of the tongue.

Details of a commissioned 11’ x 7’ velvet and fibrous installation representing insides as seen on the outside made the same time that I was reading about ants linking the inside and the outside in May of 2023

There are 130 million years of history on the backs of these ants but everything happens in a blink. Time contracts. Time decomposes itself…Time elongates itself. Some eighty million years ago an ant was trapped within an amber and the fossil of Sphecomyrma freyi came into view.
Time thins out. Hymenopterans, mimetics, symphites, the words amble away and cross the border of Mictlán. Here they go, one after another, words and ants, carrying the bones of the dead on the protective shells of their exoskeletons.”

Monday, April 3rd 7:45 am

Again, I return to Oyamada’s book, because I can’t stop thinking about it. Sentence one was selected by skimming the page until I found: “there was something black at his feet.”

This time I wrote in response before finding sentence two, my unknown ending.

There was something black at his feet. It was somewhat obscured, an indistinguishable size, it’s movements slow and shadow-like. Before I could identify what I was seeing, it slipped into a nearby gutter, disappearing down the drain. I must have imagined it. For a moment, the sound of insects stopped, then started buzzing louder.

Sunday, April 9th 10:59 am

I copied the words “As if on the verge of a threshole-hold” from page 32 of Lara Mimosa Montes’ book Thresholes.

Mimosa Montes’ book shares the same title as one of artist Gordon Matta-Clark’s early “building cut” projects Bronx Floors (1972-73). Matta-Clark who referred to himself as an “anarchitect,” would dissect buildings, cutting and cropping sections, dismantling interiors by separating ceilings from walls and walls from floors— photographing each intervention.

Threshole is a diptych in this series, which highlights a cut made beneath a door, allowing viewers to imagine the type of rooms it had once been connected to. Mimosa Montes’ notes this title’s wordplay as a concept linked to the artist’s aim “to transform place into a state of mind by opening walls where doors never were.”

Judith Russi Kirshner, Christian Kravagna, *Gordon Matta-Clark, (*Phaidon Press Limited, 2003) 64-65 as seen on my front porch

Two found sentences are their own thresholes. Cutting and cropping creates openings, where depending on your vantage point a hole can be seen as either a view through the ceiling above or from the floor below.

While writing as a response to the prompt two found sentences, I have simultaneously been returning to a collection of vinyl letters collected off the wall at the end of my thesis exhibition. Looking at letters layered on top of one another, my eye searches for words, reading their absence.

In the beginning, I was somewhat dubious that this writing exercise would lead me back to my art practice, but here I am finding a new network of connected holes: a tunnel with new layers of complexity exposed.

And as a bonus, I am excited to say that as a new member of the artist collective, Carnation Contemporary, I will be exhibiting this series of printed mini works on paper at Form.a, an art press fair focused on artist-run spaces in Portland, OR.

On July 1st from 2-8pm at Oregon Contemporary I will be showing with fellow artists from Carnation as well as makers from many other artist-run spaces such as but not limited to: Well Well Projects, Stelo Arts, Wave Contemporary and more. Come say hi!

Where would you look for a found sentence?

(W)hole Studies

January 31, 2023 Elizabeth Arzani

As I type these words, my month long artist residency with New Harmony Clay Projects is coming to an end. I am sitting in the corner house situated between a Roofless Church and a Grapevine Bar. The church is as roofless as it sounds and the bar lives up to its name with its charming vaulted ceiling covered in painted grapevines.

I’ve been living in this corner house, one of the original Harmonist log cabins built in the early 1800s, known as the Barrett-Gate House, with two other artists in residence: Sarah Alsaied and Grant Akiyama. Together we live amongst the many ghost stories that permeate old historic buildings secluded in sleepy ghost towns.

This one in particular is located in New Harmony, Indiana.

Between the creaking floors and flickering lights and from behind the door that unlatches itself, I finished reading Jenny Boully’s Betwixt and Between: Essays on the Writing Life, concluding with the essay “On Beginnings and Endings.”

“An ending tumbles toward you over and over again; an ending will not stay flat, will not stay put; an ending troubles and taunts; an ending is sleep lost.

An ending is a puzzle without a picture; an ending says that despite whatever it is that one of us wanted, nothing more can be done.”

“A beginning is asking: more please.”

On my first walk around town, it didn’t take long to notice a theme of labyrinths. Graphically they appeared in various scales. Some stretched above my head, painted white on red brick, while others greeted me in small details— painted blue and white on the town hall sign.

Adjacent to the studio, I found an interactive walking labyrinth. Officially it is called the Cathedral Labyrinth and Sacred Garden. Its path is burnt onto the surface of polished granite, following a geometry based off of the French Chartres Cathedral, considered the “mother labyrinth.”

In New Harmony labyrinths are embedded in the history of this town. In 1814 it was the site of a religiously oriented Harmonie Society inspired by ideals of a utopia and the work of German theologian Johaan Valentin Andreae who designed a utopian labyrinthine city called Christianapolis.

On my orientation tour facilitated by New Harmony Clay Project’s Program Manager Mitzi Davis, it was noted that a labyrinth is different from a maze.

According to Hermann Kern’s in depth research that traces the histories of labyrinths from the Bronze Age to the present in his book, Through the Labyrinth: Designs and Meanings, the reason that mazes and labyrinths have become obfuscated over time is due to the way they have been employed as literary motifs.

I stumbled upon this thick compilation of research at the Working Men’s Institute first floor library. The second floor houses the museum and art gallery. Davis aptly described the museum as a wunderkammer or cabinet of curiosities; recommending it to see the taxidermied eight legged Siamese twin calf from the 1800s.

It is a thing of nightmares with true New American Horror Story potential. Which I suppose is fitting for a town that Joni Mayhan, local paranormal investigator and author of Haunted New Harmony describes as:

“a thin place — a place where the veil between the living and the dead is especially transparent, like a sheet left on the line too long.”

While Mayhan writes about how the entire town is haunted with each chapter touring you from one haunted building to another; spiritual places such as labyrinths are the only exception.

Kern pinpoints that as a metaphor the labyrinth signifies a difficult, unclear, confusing situation. He notes that its proverbial usage links the labyrinth to the concept of a maze as a tortuous structure, appearing with many paths, dead ends or blind alleys. However, Kern emphasizes that depictions of labyrinths (graphic or physical constructions) from antiquity to the Middle Ages, and up to the Renaissance only demonstrate one path with no possibility of going astray.

“The most important part of a labyrinth is the negative space of the path formed by those lines which determine the pattern of movement - the shape of circuits inside.”

“As a graphic, linear figure, a labyrinth is best defined first in terms of form. Lines appear as delineating walls and the space between them as a path…the sole function is to define choreographically a fixed pattern of movement…a walking path between the lines.”

Just as a labyrinth is not a maze, Kern also stresses that they are not spirals, meanders, knots or concentric circles either. A meander doesn’t have a center. A knot or woven pattern are many lines intersecting or single lines that circumscribe themselves. A spiral is not completely enclosed by an outer line or continual, pendular changes in direction. And concentric circles can only be a labyrinth if each circle has an opening that can be entered.

While the layout of the path is not fixed and has many varying designs throughout history and cultures there are principles of form.

The transformation of a square into a circle or the phenomenon of squaring a circle reveals, according to Kern, how both shapes: squares and circles can simultaneously orient locations and symbolic meanings. A square mimics four points of a compass and a circle reflects the circumference of surface area.

Both shapes are inherent to a labyrinth and represent a worldview of the circle as a symbol of the heavens and the square as a symbol of the earth. The sign posted outside of the Cathedral Labyrinth shared that Native Americans consider the circle sacred, referring to the circle as “the hoop of life” — the continuity of life and eternity.

Circles keep reappearing. Before arriving in New Harmony, I listened to Lisa Congdon’s podcast: Episode 30: A Conversation with Morgan Harper Nichols on Wholeness. Throughout the episode she discusses her definitions of wholeness deriving from a Rilke poem:

“I live my life in widening circles that reach out”

For Harper Nichols, wholeness is a circle— many circles. “Wholeness is drawing from the present in unlikely places with unlikely connections.”

I found this to be true while walking by the Wabash River behind the Antheneum Vistor’s Center and stumbling upon Eames Demetrius’ site specific markers: “written stories (often in bronze, concrete or stone) that emphasize not only what is written but where you experience the reading (and often the forms).”

These markers are part of his ongoing series titled Kcymaerxthaere - the name of an alternate universe that he claims to coexists with ours.

The title derives from two cognate words (words in two languages that share a similar spelling, meaning, and pronunciation):

kcymaara: true physicality of the planet
xthaere: a shape with almost an infinity of dimensions or sides

Demetrius, who refers to himself as a “geographer at large,” describes this series as a storytelling experience, “reading as a fulcrum into or with another world…stories as renavigation.”

“ A sentence is an archipelago of words.”

I came to New Harmony Clay Projects as an artist in residence to research and experiment with creating a series of vessels designed with holes using methods of additive and subtractive clay construction to mimick the homonyms: whole and hole.

In preparation for my residency, I purchased Hilary Plum’s latest book, Hole Studies. I was intrigued by Plum’s definition of a hole as how to care for a question. Although she doesn’t directly say this. Plum writes of holes on various topics that encompass the personal and the political. She writes about holes as boring, unsupervised, slow paced office jobs with sentences that say “when your husband is dying you get a job that pays better.”

A hole is an email that begins with sorry i’ve been slow to write back.

Many of her studies of holes exists as but are not limited to: tunnels and research on jobs in academia and writing and for caregivers or those caring for the caregivers. She reflects on her role and experience as a teacher. In teaching, a hole becomes “a space for a circle…a threshold between knowing and unknowing, attuned to surprise…a willingness to adapt and shift..and how to care for a question.”

At the heart of my inquiry of the homonyms whole and hole is a question that I keep coming back to — when is absence present or presence absent?

While ruminating on this question, I began to compile sets of definitions and proceed to cut them out by hand, either subtracting the words letter by letter or the space around the words. The leftover remnants, the in-between shapes or lone letters broken from their words, became material for new compositions.

Burrowing further, pieces began to connect in the process of arranging, assembling, gluing, scanning, printing, tracing, painting, transferring, burning, screen printing and then repeatedly painting, cutting and pasting for a second time.

B6CED492-2A4F-4010-9079-EAC648927949 2.JPG

C89EB2EF-2CD5-405A-A2AB-0E8936FCA552 2.JPG

Holes are subtractions that reveal what is missing, acting as a threshold between interior glimpses and exterior facades. Added objects prod and poke, nestle in crevices and corners, turning holes into containers. These elements fill in gaps, mend what was broken or meet you in the center.

Words can be vessels—deep wells to fall into and shallow entrapments.

An erasure practice is both additive and subtractive simultaneously. Poet and scholar Robin Coste Lewis lectures on the many forms of an erasure practice. Language itself being one. Lewis articulates that erasure is the art of creating a new work out of an existing one. What the poet Jeannie Vanasco calls “absent things as if they are present.”

These abstracted ceramic letter forms are erasures. Initially found as fragments on the ground, I reproduced them with clay pressed into a plaster mold. Rather than translating a word or phrase, I was more interested in their materiality. By allowing the letters to touch they become something new, a (w)hole, a meandering path, lost in thought and lingering in cast shadows and the ghosts of stories they once knew.

A week into my residency, I finished a notebook I had started a year prior. Curious, I decided to collect the found fragments from my own writing to see what they might say.

While cutting and cropping my words, erasing and pasting their fragments back together, I decided to see what happens when I take them off the page and allow them to sit upright.

I am very grateful for this time to experiment and ask questions of ceramics. Thank you to Lenny Dowhie, Mitzi Davis, Elizabeth Garland, and the welcoming community of New Harmony as well as financial support from The Regional Arts & Culture Council’s Arts3C Grant for this opportunity.

In many ways this ending is a beginning that says more please.

Would You Ever?

October 20, 2022 Elizabeth Arzani

Stepping over the knotted red rope, with coffee and donuts in hand, we took our seats, circled together in the space of the gallery called the arena.

Here, artists and longtime best friends Nan Curtis and Mk Guth gathered to lead a conversational artist talk, a ‘Coffee Talk,’ discussing Cairnatopia, Nan’s recent solo exhibition in a raw, unfinished, unpainted space; presenting artwork installed between walls of visible pink insulation.

This show, hosted by Sator Projects, is one in a series of migrating exhibitions directed by Jess Nickel, whose mission is to utilize overlooked spaces as seeds for bringing art to the community.

I have worked closely with Nan (and MK too). Nan was my mentor my last semester of grad school and in many ways continues to be. Leading up to this show, I worked as her artist assistant, spending summer days sweating in the studio and late afternoons swimming in her backyard pool.

Despite our extended time together, it was from inside the red roped arena where I was hearing of her collection commission series for the first time. I am not sure whether it was mentioned before or after the unanswered question, “can you make art out of anything?” But it was most likely this rhetorical remark that shifted our group conversation.

Hearing Nan recall being commissioned to work with other people’s collections, with random and very specific things like a stack of old exhibition cards, or a family collection of inherited lace from Europe, flooded me with a myriad of would you ever possibilities. Ideas which I am still churning over in my head.

At that moment, I eagerly and instinctually raised my hand, injecting myself into the conversation to ask, “are you currently accepting submissions?”

“Yes.”

But before each project begins, a commission form and questionnaire has to be completed. It turns out this series initiated as part of The Rekindling, a 2011 exhibition at The Nine Gallery, an administratively and financially independent, artist-run space situated within Blue Sky Gallery, Oregon Center for Photography. It was here, eleven years ago that Nan’s first collection commission began.

In the essay, Coming Clean, Portland based director and curator Stephanie Snyder reflected on her own relationship with collecting, stating that in her childhood experience, collecting was a way of organizing the things around her—a way to cope.

“We tend to build collections when we’re young, and as we age, we experience the weight and burden of ownership. We purchase, we haul, we sort and store, and eventually we inherit. Sometimes we hoard. It all becomes too much at a certain point—a landscape of physical and emotional baggage. And yet we peruse the objects of others’ lives, amassed in thrift stores and spread on tables at estate sales, and we re-locate ourselves and our memories there.”

Stephanie Snyder, Coming Clean, The Rekindling , pg 13

For Nan, place, memory, and emotion are marked by piles. Interactive, stoic, playful and unpredictably bouncy, these piles stand, droop, tilt, and lean–they haunt; they greet us when we look up, nestled in the rafters above our heads or ask us to stop and look down when placed discretely at your feet. Their presence is a way of navigating the seen and unseen. Cairnatopia, recalls a long history of marking with piles.

“A cairn is a marker, a memorial, a constructed object — a memory arranged for a space and viewer. Historically, a cairn is constructed of piled rocks, ranging in type from as few as three to mark a trail to as large as a hillside. They pre-date history and can be found in every culture across the globe, the simple and universal act of a person stacking, making a pile from the objects around them to make a mark, preserve a memory or send a message.”

Ashley Gifford, founder of Art & About

The rocks in Nan’s current exhibition, both the illuminated glass and the flocked plaster were made from molds of a rock that Nan had taken with her to Yucca Valley Material Lab, a place known for material curiosity.

Heidi Schwegler founder of YVML recently wrote about the objects she encounters in the desert. In the essay, Single Use, Schwegler defines nature as an ‘unintended craftsperson.’

In the desert, the Santa Ana winds reshape neglected material. Trees and cacti become an array of tools: hole-punchers, nails, and push pins, armatures for molding and nets for catching. The desert sun bleaches color, with time peeling it away from its outermost layer. Schwegler refers to all making processes (both environmental and human) as varying ‘levels of pressure and resistance.’

Pressure & Resistance spotted while dog walking

Yet, Schwegler also claims that ‘once something is made we are forever tasked with stalling its natural tendency towards breakdown and disorder. Disconnected from use-value it may still exist in our world (like a ruin) but has been reduced to a mere presentation of the past.’

As part of my new job as an Assistant Studio Manager for Wildcraft Studio School, I am often assisting with a variety of classes that revitalize craft traditions. In a Sashiko Japanese Mending workshop, I learned from Tyler Peterson that the term ‘sashiko’ translates to ‘little stabs’ or ‘little pierce.’

It is both a decorative and functional form of embroidery used as a way to extend the life of each inch of fabric. Mottainai, meaning ‘do not waste,’ is another Japanese term I learned from Tyler, referring to a deep reverence for material and the desire not to squander…a practical need for repair.

After assisting with several weaving classes, whether it was ripping up and repurposing old bed linens and braiding them into a rug or prepping himalayan blackberries for cordage and basket weaving, I’ve become more interested in learning different ways to weave. I can’t help but wonder if this new interest is a natural tendency to stall the inevitable.

In Francesca Capone’s Light Journal, a book about ‘colorful tapestries of text in time,’ she compares the act of writing to the act of weaving. While I am not experienced on a loom, I have been weaving stories in one way or another since I can remember. Collecting is an act of storytelling.

Woven in time is a pile of my great grandmother’s diaries and letters — a treasure trove I found while visiting family and cleaning out closets. Upon opening the box stashed at the back corner of a shelf, I audibly gasped out loud.

I sometimes forget that not everyone is as interested in a collection of old letters and coverless stained books. My mom isn’t —she laughed at me for getting so excited.

Sure, the scripted Italian letters are beautiful and the ability to read a hand typed recollection of the day my great grandmother’s father died is a pretty rare experience, but what do you do with it?

You might smirk at the odd things a 1920s diary will include: rates of postage, rate of income stocks, weather signals from the US Department of Agriculture, a what-to-do-list in case of accidents listed under the title ‘Help!’ and next to it a list of antidotes for poisons.

I assume most people would throw away something as useless as penciled key notes, by this I mean literally traced shapes of keys drawn lightly in pencil with numbered notes inside and arrows indicating things like: spare wheel.

Why hold onto the collaged and now yellowed newspaper clipped recipe pages that include how to get rid of buffalo bugs pasted just above:

‘to fix frosting—if a little flour is rubbed over a cake, frosting will not run off easily but will remain where it is wanted.’

Is there any value in a handwritten mortgage ledger from the 1930s? I still don’t know what to do with this odd collection of very specific information.

In some ways it feels wrong to read (or attempt to read) these love letters and diaries and at the same time I love this porthole into the life of a women whose name I carry.

When my grandfather died and my grandmother, Mimi was cleaning and throwing out things, she gave me his old blueprints. With these items, I didn’t hesitate to cut them up and incorporate them as material in my own work. I knew right away what I wanted to do with them.

*Loyal & Royal,* 2013, Serigraphy, Collage, Acrylic on Paper, 30” x 44” Inches

It would have been too heartbreaking for them to sit in a corner to fade away.

While I am still trying to decide which items from my personal collections I would like to commission Nan to work with, I’m unsure whether or not I have all the answers to her questionnaire.

If you were to submit a collection commission form, how would you answer the following questions:

Why have you saved these things?

Where did you get it/them?

How long have you been adding to it?

Do you live with it or is it in storage?

Is it an emotional collection?

Does it need to remain usable?

Writing as Transformation

July 18, 2022 Elizabeth Arzani

Skipping any and all introductions, I tumbled (late and sweaty) into a reading of “An Archipelago of A Year,” by Alexandria Juarez. I wiped my forehead as K-Ming Chang lead the discussion, emphasizing how this flash fiction is circular rather than linear, “beginning and ending with the landscape of a body.”

“A title teaches the reader how to read”
“presence as absence”
“islands of time in proximity.”

Post graduation, I had managed to slip into another Low-Residency Creative Writing workshop. Supplied with a list of writing prompts I chose: A List of Ten Things That Have Happened in the Past Year.

It occurred to me that I typically don’t reflect on a year unless I am at the beginning or end of it. Yet, in some ways graduating in May after two years in graduate school is its own beginning of an end.

Life jolting transitions catapult me into strange states of being hyper aware and simultaneously lost in time. A year: what can…did happen?

1. Meeting in the same place while being worlds apart.

Saturday, February 12, 2022, Portland, OR 9:53 am drinking too much coffee, I wrote down:

Now when I mark my calendar to ‘meet’ with someone I must specify whether we will meet in real life (IRL) or in a virtual (alternate) space. What is real and what is not? To be in the company of someone isn’t always the same physical space.

2. Meeting when my morning is their evening in different places of the same world

An excerpt of my risograph printed thesis, *The Curious Distance From Foot to Fingertip*

3. Reaching the peak of a goal

Saturday March 5th, 2022, the middle of the intersection between N Tillamook St and N Kirby Ave in Portland, OR 11: 29 am (Ilsa for scale)

Sunday, May 22nd at roughly 4:30 pm with my knees shaking from behind the podium, I stood center-stage at the Tiffany Center reading my commencement speech aloud to my graduating class:

“A few months ago when I was headed to the studios one morning, I witnessed something I’d never seen before. From afar it looked suspicious, but up close, I found it strangely beautiful. To my surprise what I encountered that morning was a giant pile of fortune cookies, crushed, and crumbled in the middle of an intersection; a crossroads exposing hundreds of affirmations. It feels similar to this moment. Instead of tiny sized words laying on the ground staring up at me, I see the crossroads and affirmations looking back at me in your eyes.

Out of the 140 fortunes I collected that day, because that is the person I am, I found that there were two that were repeated three times. I expected at least one of them be a variation of “the current year will bring you much happiness,” but it turned out that the two fortunes that were repeated the most were:

You will make many changes before settling satisfactorily

A new pair of shoes will do you good”

4. Reaching the peak of a goal then learning how to climb down.

Monday, June 13th, 2022, day two of deinstalling my thesis exhibition. I cathartically plucked the vinyl letters from the wall and rearranged them in my sketchbook. Burying their former legibility in layers of overlap was a way to say goodbye— to say everything and nothing simultaneously.

5. Painting the entire wall blue.

Installation view of *Weather Patterns of the Room, 2022* (Image courtesy of Mario Gallucci)

The argument was initially recorded in a notebook on a Monday in March. On that day I wrote “I heard words shatter to the floor.” Which is not fully true. I had thrown an object to the ground, purposefully breaking it to fill in the blank space where words should have been. The footnote positioned near the floor reads “I wish there had been words, I desperately wanted to hear words, anything over silence.”

Detail of *Weather Patterns of the Room,* 2022 (Image courtesy of Mario Gallucci)

I knew at the time of the argument that my anger was a response to the loudness of silence. Now I have identified more than that. There was pain behind my anger, pain hidden in the feeling of invisibility.

This is why I chose the color blue. This particular blue is a commercial glaze called blue jean, made with cobalt, which in German means goblin for its historically hazardous conditions for mining something associated with arsenic vapors. In Maggie Nelson’s book, Bluets, she answers the question, “why blue” with “we don’t get to choose what or whom we love.” In Rebecca Solnit’s book, A Field Guide to Getting Lost, she refers to blue as a place where desire and disappearance converge, “a blue of distance and a landscape of emotion where inside and outside are intertwined. A color of there seen from here and the color of where you are not.”

6. Reclaiming a broken branch as a vessel.

From a fruit bearing branch to a ceramic vessel

To make these components, I replicated a chopped branch from the pear tree in my backyard along with found pipes of different sizes, curves and forms purchased from a recycling center. Timing is everything. When clay is soft enough to sculpt but still hard enough to hold the weight of its form, I cut and crop the patterns, the forms I’ve molded for reproduction, like how I cut and glue paper, joining the branch to a pipe. In this way, I also combine different patterns of pipes together bound to one another as a drawing of three-dimensional curvilinear tubes.

Molding objects from one material and casting their patterns in another is an erasure that generates new possibilities—a three-dimensional collage of forms. Made by both my hand and using mold making processes of reproduction that utilize a readymade object, a conduit, I am acknowledging my own complicity while also questioning modeled behaviors. Altering these molded forms is an attempt to interrogate and question systems I have inherited and learned.

7. Saying ‘no’ gives more room for ‘yes.’

Site-specificity is just as revealing as word choice is idiosyncratic. I’m curious how a grouping of characters can also reveal character.* I want to know about the words people live with** —both those that are dusty from sitting on the shelf (only for display) and those that have tattered edges from the many fingers that have touched them. Which words entice people to turn a page? Which words do people follow around a corner? What are the words that accidentally slip out and stain the rug? Is it the word itself, the person (thing or being) who selected to use it or rather the sentence from which it was found that piqued*** an interest?

* Here I’ve used the word character as an example of a homonym–slippery words with identical pronunciations and spellings but different meanings. They require a reader or listener to differentiate meaning based on the environment of its sentence. Character used twice in the same sentence means something different in each use.

**My friend A refers to arguments as discussions. She lowers her voice when she solemnly states, “we had lots of discussions” yesterday. S says hello and goodbye with a firm affirmation: party.

***Piqued was autocorrected. I first wrote peeked. I was most likely thinking about the phrase ‘sneak peek,’ but more times than not I want to write sneak peak, like I’ve climbed the mountain and have finally reached the summit for my glimpse between the clouds. Piqued is also a homophone, a word that sounds the same as another word but is spelled differently and has a different meaning; a curious word for saying it’s curious.

8. My corner of the studio looked larger with all my things in it than it did emptied.

I think about translation as relationships, connections between things, the circumstances, and conditions where language lives or occupies space and its power to generate and eliminate space. How does this show up in visual languages–the language of things, in detritus, the lost and found, the consumed and recycled, rejected, and cherished? Where does this show up in the circularity of time?

9. As I sat the couple at the window seat of the restaurant, we witnessed a naked man across the street squat at the curb to shit.

K-Ming asked the same four questions that were asked of her by a former professor:

What do you haunt?
What do you hunt?
What hunts you?
What haunts you?

10. I was hired by MK Guth to cut roughly 150 yards of fabric (500+ pieces each 9” x 60” inches) in three days.

My time cutting left a beautiful remnant carved into the table, recording my choreographed movements—MK’s instructions followed by my slide of hand. While my fingers are still numb, it has been a privilege to work with MK Guth, helping to prepare material for her interactive performance and exhibition, Be A Part of It! at Cristin Tierney Gallery. For the first six days of the show, visitors will be invited to write their names on silver satin ribbons. These ribbons will be braided together, extending off of Guth’s hair.

“Guth will keep the work attached to her hair as the braid grows in length and weight from July 18th through July 23rd. Over the following week, July 25-29, the braid will be cut and she will begin to sew the ribbons and faux hair into vessel-like sculptures in the gallery. The artist’s residency concludes on the 29th, and the finished works will remain on view through August 12th.

Audience interaction is at the heart of Guth’s practice. With each performance she hopes to shift viewers’ mindsets and prescribed patterns of navigating life through one-on-one conversation. Conceived in early 2022, Be Part of It! was directly influenced by the isolation and loneliness experienced by many during the pandemic. Guth seized the opportunity to create a work about belonging, in which authorship would be completed by participants.”

-Excerpts from the Press Release

These invitations to low-stakes writing exercises included an introduction to Zuihitsu, a Japanese form of writing described as: suggestion, irregularity, simplicity, perishability and spontaneity. K-Ming asked what happens when I allow for space between my words?

Taking my random list of ten memories from the past year, I attempted to write in Zuihitsu using shorter fragmentations born from my meandering memories.

When you let your memories meander, what shape do they make?

Notes on Translation

January 16, 2022 Elizabeth Arzani

For a second consecutive year, I have had the opportunity to attend a workshop hosted by Pacific Northwest College of Art’s Low Residency MFA in Creative Writing Program. Alejandro de Acosta led a three day Translation Class asking participants to read, write and experiment like a translator; inviting all monolingual, bilingual and multilingual learners to participate.

Which one are you? (quote from Lily Meyer)

As a maker of things, my relationship with the concept of translation has predominately been focused on capturing or replicating the essence of something (i.e. an experience, a form or tone, a mood, a perspective, etc.) in different media. Translations between image and words (including those that were never there to begin with).

Translation as connection: lines assembled by their color and texture. Sometimes they are continuous lines of clutter - an attempt to translate grief from a fine tipped leaky pen.

Things I heard Alejandro de Acosta say about translation

For this workshop the lines were a vast and varied reading list. Many of the articles were a dense discussion of famous writers’ styles and varied perspectives on the art of translation. Vladimir Nabokov, Jorge Luis Borges, Ezra Pound, Augusto de Campos and Macedonio Fernández are prominent in these selections. It also covered the Oulipo group (Ouvroir de littérature potentielle) with their writing constraints, citing Georges Perec’s famous French novel, La Disparition (1969) written entirely without the letter e, later translated to English adhering to the same rules by Gilbert Adair in 1995 under the title, A Void.

I’m new to Perec’s writing and currently in the midst of reading his book, Species of Spaces and Other Pieces, which I decided to use for de Acosta’s first assignment.

Step One: Translation as Research.

By intentionally focusing on the translator’s notes, in this case provided by, John Sturrock, I began to read his introduction and footnotes as a set of index cards, a trail of histories, tracing down clues, and recovering hidden backstories. For Sturrock translation acted as a type of collaboration. As a reader, the experience made me feel like I was being let in on newly found secrets.

Excerpt from Sturrock’s Introduction to Georges Perec’s *Species of Spaces and Other Pieces.*

Step Two: Stage a Return.

I followed Sturrock’s footnote on page 33 that explained the source of Dame Tartine’s Palace in Perec’s line:

“…it could be a sort of Dame Tartine’s Palace,* gingerbread walls, furniture made from plasticine, etc.”

In my staged return I discovered the nursery rhyme which details a beautiful palace made of fresh butter with praline walls and biscotti floors; illustrating the specific interior design of Dame Tartine’s French gingerbread house, which I would not have pictured otherwise.

By day two de Acosta was arguing against definitive translations, preferring a more open door method; translation as ongoing. In the section of the workshop titled: Pound & The Cribs, de Acosta shared ways in which American Poet Ezra Pound approached translating Chinese poetry without knowing Chinese.

Pound relied heavily on the help of scholars, dictionaries, notes and the word for word “cribs,” written by Ernest Fenollosa in order to write and publish Cathay, his famous book of translated Chinese poetry in English.

de Acosta encouraged experimenting with translation in this way. Calling a text with facing pages, a two page spread of something already translated, as a modern day crib. I selected Francis Ponge’s poem, Pluie, translated by C.K. Williams.

Excerpt from *Francis Ponge Selected Poems* pg 6-7 (I would have liked to have shown you the entire page of “cribs” but Wake Forest University Press would need to give me permission)

My translation is as follows:

This exercise in translation gave me a new understanding of what de Acosta meant when he said “translation is a painful thing, always imperfect - a source of joy.”

I still prefer translating in visual media over translating between words.

Like the way I can translate a bottle from glass to ceramic with the use of a two-part plaster mold as my Google translator, a similarly inconsistent mystery box with varying results.

Or most recently in the form of a traveling sketchbook, if we are to think about translation as a process of moving something from one place to another.

Elizabeth Arzani, Site Specific Maps, pg 1-2

I hope you write back pg 3-4 (E) copy.jpg

Yellow is my Happy (S) pg 10-11 copy.jpg

Window into my mind (S) pg 12-13 copy.jpg

cycles, circles and collage(S) pg 16-17 copy.jpg

cycles, circles and collage(S) pg 16-17 pt 2 copy.jpg

cycles, circles and collage(S) pg 16-17 pt 3.jpg

cycles, circles and collage(S) pg 16-17 pt 4 copy.jpg

checklists and poems(S) pg 18-19 copy.jpg

Daily Blackout and Cloud Splosion (c) 24-25.jpg

cycles, circles and collage(S) pg 16-17 pt 5 copy.jpg

staying connected II (A)pg 36-37 copy.jpg

looking for hugs and laughs(A)pg 40 copy1.jpg

The sketchbook started in Portland, OR with me in August of 2020 and traveled to three other people in Luxembourg before returning to my doorstep this week. Collaborators include: Sarah Ketema, Carole Stoltz and Anne Krier, for which each of their contributions to this project I am so very grateful.

Translation as collaboration: it is the best feeling to send a project out in the world and have it reciprocated by friends.

Tell your friends you love them - make it weird

November 2, 2021 Elizabeth Arzani

My friendship with Adé Hogue was mostly from a distance; the kind of friendship where we could go weeks without talking, but also pick up right where we left off. He was always Broderick to me and one of the few people I’ve allowed to call me Liz.

When we moved away to different cities, we started to send each other snail mail. The last text I have from him was his address.

We only lived in the same city for a few years, but somehow managed to find ways to keep meeting each other in different places and parts of the world.

Three months ago, after years of saying I would come visit him in Chicago, I purchased a ticket and finally fulfilled my promise. Monday, August 2nd was the last day we spent together. It was a sunny (but not too hot) summer day, perfect for a patio lunch under striped umbrellas. Not surprisingly we ate fried chicken. He even let me have the last hushpuppy.

That day Adé gave me a tour of West Chicago and some hip neighborhoods near his new apartment. I enjoyed exploring and meandering without any set destination the same way we did when he came to visit me in Luxembourg. I appreciated that he would frequently stop to take photos just as much if not more than me; capturing as many details as possible.

That’s what made him a brilliant designer. I knew it when we first met in Pete Hurdle’s Digital Media class at UNCC. I didn’t have a clue what I was doing and Adé did. I strategically sat next to him and asked him a million questions.

I have proudly followed his career from working with design firms in Chicago to being his own boss and navigating freelance as a young, talented black man in a predominately white industry. (You can watch one of his creative sessions with Adobe Creative Cloud here). He generously shared his experiences openly and honestly, with endless encouragement, patience and lots of laughter.

From cross-country pen pals to creative barters (logos for artwork), impromptu kayaking adventures, traveling in Europe, professional advice or encouraging personal projects (including this blog)— we kept in touch over the last eleven years. Most of the things we did together were last minute, or only somewhat planned. Collaborating spontaneously in my studio late at night was one of those times which I will be forever grateful for.

The day I left Chicago, I was lucky enough to fly home in a plane wrapped in letters Adé designed.

There are no words to describe how much I miss my friend.

He would also laugh at how many times it took me to get this shot right.

(Edit 1/4/22)

Ok, so I do have some words. They came to me after flying back to Chicago for Adé’s memorial, meeting his many friends and family and taking flowers to his ghost bike.

It’s in the details.

In words - their placement: where they show up in a sentence.

Words that carry histories; the voices of others.

Their shape

Their curves

In elegant script

Standing

Slanting

Not too close, not too far apart

Leaning in, whispering softly

Touching

Words felt in the body

In goosebumps

With awe and laughter

In the corners of a smile

And also a deep, heavy sigh

A sharp pain

The tear building in my eye

Words said below the surface

Words said with eyes

With hands

With the dance of your feet

The pace of your walk like a sentence skipping across the street of your lined page.

Ocean Vuong wrote: the saddest thing in the world is a comma forced to be a period.

You will never be a period.

You vibrate in exclamation points.

Your laughter still echoes.

I hear you chuckle as I try to figure out how to wear a summer floral dress in November in Chicago.

I hear you tell me how much you love sunflowers while we are standing in a stranger’s garden

Now I am asking strangers where I can find a sunflower in November in your Windy City

The skies are blue, the sun gold

I look down at the sticker that presents itself in the shape of a sunflower

Now stuck to the walk sign above a picture of you, above flowers (perky and drooping / real and fake) poking, tied, and clinging to the surface of a spray painted white bike - your ghost bike

I watch people jay walk through the intersection. And they continue to walk on to the park

That should be you

Yet, your words walk

Your words continue

They walk alongside me. And more people than I can count

They show up in the colors of a sunset, wrapping around us

They are edgeless, borderless

Words you step into willfully

Creating space - expanding out past what our eyes can physically see

Words with room to imagine

Words that slow you down

That stop and sit next to you

Words that expand and collapse time

Spiraled in a circle, coiled slowly with my fingertips

Released, their tension relaxes and out falls a paper rose

In honor of the rose you loved

A rose that grew from concrete.

Adé, I will always love you.

Edit 9/9/22: The Adé Hogue Foundation has been created to honor and continue Adé’s legacy. The foundation is dedicated to supporting the BIPOC community, underprivileged youth, and supporting Adé’s passions such as cycling and running as well as the educational pursuits for creatives.

Inconsistently Consistent

August 24, 2021 Elizabeth Arzani

Paradoxes keep reappearing, like the inconsistently consistent way I write and publish my thoughts here.

They sneak up in my everyday encounters and attempts at routines. Like my ‘daily’ (sometimes once a week or whenever I can) practice of writing lists - a whatever comes to mind, walking list.

One list came to me in the middle of the night, written on September 17th, 2020, after moving to a new city in a pandemic while also under the threat of wild fires.

It became a poem embedded in the sculpture, Stack of Words, made from a balancing act of modular components.

Something about a secret poem that couldn’t be read shelved within an absurd sculpture made of everything from: packaging cardboard to carpet padding, embroidery thread, a twig and copper wire to plaster and repurposed wood, a leaf and a rock, plaster and cement, bicycle tire tubes and a ceramic candelabra. It represented a layered complexity that words felt incapable of containing.

Paradoxes like ‘alone together’ emerged for many as a mantra at the beginning of the pandemic, but it was the oxymoron, ‘faraway nearby,’ the title of Rebecca Solnit’s collection of essays, which had been living with me prior.

The title itself is said by Solnit to be gleaned from the painter, Georgia O’Keefe, noting the way she signed her letters after she moved to New Mexico, although as of yet, I’ve only found a painting with this title.

Solnit’s words, ‘The Familiar Edge of the Unknown,’ became the title of my recent two-person exhibition with painter, Tanner Lind.

Video courtesy of Alan Viramontes

"The bigness of the world is redemption. Despair compresses you into a small space, and a depression is literally a hollow in the ground. To dig deeper into the self, to go underground, is sometimes necessary, but so is the other route of getting out of yourself, into the larger world, into the openness in which you need not clutch your story and your troubles so tightly to your chest. Being able to travel both ways matters, and sometimes the way back into the heart of the question begins by going outward and beyond. This is the expansiveness that sometimes comes literally in a landscape or that tugs you out of yourself in a story...just to know that the ocean went on for many thousands of miles was to know that there was an outer border to my own story, and even to human stories and that something else picked up beyond. It was the familiar edge of the unknown, forever licking at the shore."

pg.31 Rebecca Solnit, The Faraway Nearby

(Left) Elizabeth Arzani, Stack of Words, 2020 (Right) Elizabeth Arzani & Tanner Lind, At Finger’s End, 2021

Elizabeth Arzani and Tanner Lind, The Familiar Edge of the Unknown, 2021, installation view

My individual work featured in the exhibition was about what Solnit describes as going underground, ‘the digging deep.’ I had dived head first into personal experience, private conversations and inner dialogues.

In many ways, I was referring to a category of study that the artist and writer, Moyra Davey defines as ‘the Wet.’ In her essay, The Wet and The Dry (The Social Life of the Book), ‘the Wet’ is introduced as a problem, a ‘welling up’ of something not ready to be told, what cannot be faced, the opposite of ‘the Dry.’

This process of working is a visual language of in-betweens, similar to how Jan Verwoert defines abstraction in his essay, The Beauty and Politics of Latency: On the Work of Tomma Abts. It holds two or more things at once, what Verwoert describes as “temporal latency in twofold: that which is not yet and that which is no longer present…an echo chamber of the yet unthought and the presently forgotten.”

It is not that unlike how Davey details her ‘daily rehearsal of lost and found,’ the moments of looking for what-was and the feeling of there it is.

“The ritual is about creating a lacuna, a pocket of time into which I will disappear…Lost and found is a ritual of redemption. If I find the thing then I am a worthy person. I have been granted a reprieve…I know this ritual is a rehearsal for all the inevitable, bigger losses. I think if I can only find X, then I am holding back the floodwaters, I am in control.”
Moyra Davey, Index Cards

(Left) Why Can’t You Hear Me?, 2020, (Right) Is It You?, 2020 — (Left) *Why Can’t You Hear Me?,* 2020, (Right) *Is It You?,* 2020

My own lost and found story occurred on a late afternoon, in the middle of summer. The branches were swaying in a welcomed breeze when I found Allison Cobb reading from her recently published book, Plastic, An Autobiography. Sitting in 1122 Outside, a backyard gallery, I listened, to her detail ‘the yes’ and ‘the no’ as a different way of saying ‘the Wet’ and ‘the Dry.’

It was my own ‘yes’ and ‘no’ that led me to accidentally, yet eagerly, join a poetry reading I didn’t know was going to happen. In a series of unfortunate events: wrong turns that I couldn’t correct until seven miles later, the spraying of sticky cold-brew coffee, fumbling the dates for hotels and arriving without a place to stay; a heat wave and an early fire season, accompanied by the hazy skies above the dry desert and the blood orange ominous sun that I’ve seen more than I’d like to. This was my no, my hell no.

The color of the sky during the fires, September 2020, Portland OR

Yet, each spill, wrong turn and incorrect combination of numbered dates are what led me to my yes. To the happenstance of sitting at a new-to-me place at the right time on the right day after driving through the night to return to where I started. The no meeting the yes.

The bizarre shift of unexpected circumstances, in under 24 hours lead me to sitting on a bench listening to Cobb read aloud.

“ I am the no and the yes - a line from the poet 'Annah Sobelman’s first book. It has lived with me for years, sometimes whispering through my mind in its old remembered rhythm.”

As I continued to read on my own, I found Cobb pulling this line along, entangled in her writing; explaining her own lived experiences and identifying them in others.

Found in both the pages of Cobb’s book as well as beside her at the backyard podium, I listened and witnessed as visual artist and third generation atomic bomb survivor, Yukiyo Kawano described how she constructs her ‘no,’ as life-sized sculptures of bombs made with her ‘yes’ - deconstructed kimonos from her grandmother, weaving them back together with her own hair.

I also learned about Eve Tuck, scholar, Unangax̂, an enrolled member of the Aleut Community of St. Paul, Alaska, and Associate Professor of Critical Race and Indigenous Studies at the University of Toronto. Tuck is identified as having a “yes that takes the no with it, desire as synonymous with life in all its contradictory, disconcerting complexity.”

“Desire, yes, accounts for the loss and despair, but also the hope, the visions, the wisdom of lived lives and communities. Desire is involved with the not yet and, at times, the not anymore…desire is about longing, about a present that is enriched by both the past and the future. It is integral to our humanness.”
Eve Tuck, Suspending Damage, a Letter to Communities

I find my ceramic work to be a similar desire - an effort to encapsulate the truth of contradictions. I approach this material as a novice, asking the impossible to stand with its head held high, but instead of being disappointed by its inevitable slump and pull of gravity, I am intrigued by the attempts. These surprising moments where expectations have folded in on themself, but still stand, if only slightly; remaining as a failure to fail.