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.