Avian Loop Issue 2

Published Spring 2020

Classifieds:

Seeking:

my great grandfather

an engraver at the department store on Jasper avenue

C.1890, Edmonton, AB

Seeking:

a dance partner

no audience

for the future

15.07.19 15h48

Marysia is on her knees, in quadruped, then a sort of squat. She gets to standing (rolling up). She rubs her hands together and puts her palms to her eyes. She walks outside of the studio into the foyer and puts on her sandals. She steps outside and looks to the left. Marysia turns to the left and walks towards shrubbery and bush and trees and fence. She lies on the mossy, sandy grass patch between the fence and the tree.

    When she was walking her arms swayed back behind her, exhibiting a lackadaisical stroll. She brushed branches behind her that had already met her face.

    She lied there eyes open and closed. She looked at her arm and the bush. She stands up and looks over the fence leaning into the shrubbery that engulfs it, curious of the sounds made over the other side.

    She walks on the sand path and takes off her sandals (holding them in her right hand). She dropped one after the other. She sits cross legged with feet closer together than to the opposite knee and rests her forehead on her hands in front. She takes medium inhales and exhales. Humming (not unlike the tones of the flies buzzing around).

Kosta  is lying on his back with legs up against the wall. Sara walks past. She walks into his frame of view again when his head is turned to the right. He looks at Sara looking out the window. Sara steps away from the window and transfers her weight to the opposite foot to begin to walk. Kosta  says, ‘I figured out what makes Marysia special’. ‘What?’ Sara asks, leaning over Kosta , unexpectedly. ‘What allows her to go body-first into things, the ground, and earth is her intuition. For example, she went to lie on a patch of grass and when I joined her I happened to be on an ant mound and then she sat down at this other place, found a patch of grass that was like a nice patch to sit on and when I sat down it was all prickly.’ Sara laughed and said something and walked away. ‘And ants were climbing on me. She doesn’t have to stop and think about where to go, she just goes there and earth responds favourably to her.’ Kosta   continued .

16.04.20 12h24

He noticed every time he spoke about the past that he spoke in the past tense. He considered not speaking in the past tense to express his past. This would allow him to transcend the repressive grammar that society had imposed and generate new possibilities for living in the world. Also, it is opposed to what the interlocutor is engaged in: the maintenance of the status quo.

“Hey. How have you been?”

“I am  good.”

“Huh?”

It confuses the hell out of people, it amuses people, it’s somewhere in between for some people .

->

Sitting leant against scuffed white slatwall on a ledge at the end of a shelving unit half emptied of everlast silken boxer shorts taking a long view down the aisle. Strip fluorescents on dropped ceilings race shelves to a gigantic black and white photograph of Adam Levine’s face obscured by display-tier bottles of eponymous cologne. Bet it smells like his music – blow-dried axe headache birch-tar to the forefront. It was always a staple of the big box retail set. Shit, there’s his HD bearded mug at a choker over on the wall of flat screens.

Not patchwork blue-eyed soul this time round. It’s the latest joint, relinquishing hypostatised dirtydancingdynamic and leveraging the Parchebel progression for a college-grad canticle. Must have run out of toplining femme fatales and gone full solipsistic. Over there is only Levine, the divine; between here and there toy section purgatory.

One child is hammering a button that slowly tumesces some nylon waterpark apperturnance. Another straps on a pair of plastic shin guards so slapdash the chrome blasted on to them has barely reached the edges before corroding into a burnt black. Snap marks from the sprue not even sanded down and already shop-marked to hell and back. A French toddler is spinning on his back, scattering ballistics and screaming GAZ TOXIQUE DE MON CUL repeatedly until collected on the fly by his matching marmot parents en route to the church of canvas.

Fuzzed out skank bleeds through recirculated air. MAGIC‽ No, sons of Zion. Another new jamb; can’t tell the difference between commonwealth Bar-B-Reggae any longer, unless it’s the Seeds . Two thirds of a decade too late on the millenial whoop as well, drowned in ambient shoptalk and phosphorescence  and silver slivers carved in dirty linoleum.

Ten years ago it would have been the retail wail: Jason Derulo 10pm Pak’n’Save Sprite remix in my head.  No. Twenty years before that, J Farnham’s voice as I understand it, rolling past frozen foods inhaling frost burned sweetcorn mist and legs sticking straight through cart holes thinking about spacecraft schematics. Oh. The other connection between the two being the echoing snare bounce. Nowadays it’s all staccato.

21.08.20 17h30

Across the dampened cement I drag my feet. The room is full of jostling bodies and yet overwhelming in its vacuity. Encouraged along by the monochromatic hues sprawled about by vinyl tinted fluorescent tubes, my torso cuts through the sea of conversational clicks, treading carefully around vaguely dented aluminium curves reflecting abstracted videos across the floor.

Past the first tube. Yellow and sickly. Colour has a new meaning; it is no longer a spectrum but a duality. A toned back emulation of Olafur Eliasson’s Room for One Colour . Hints of blue and red explode into reality and trail off like streams of dye in pure unpolluted water.

Deeper still, I follow my feet towards a spot just past the second tube. Golden dusk spills into my soul. The bodies become denser, throwing any notion of social distancing out through the venetian-blind sealed window, back into the world of colour. My head begins to throb as I percuss the side of a can of Double Brown, anxiously trying to throw conversational hooks through the hum and into the multitude of circles forming around me.

I am lingering near the third tube. Deep, dark cadmium. I have found my sense of colour again among the shadows and familiar faces, but also a distaste for tightly packed spaces. Unprosperously trying to catch glimpses between legs and rubbing shoulders at the variety of screens strewn around the edges of the room. I’m torn between basking in the amber fluorescence and bee-lining towards the rich aegean street. Maybe this is the experience that was intended for me, or maybe I’m supposed to return on a quieter day to investigate the missing pieces from this deepening sunset puzzle .

20.08.20 18h00

The Four of Swords card depicts a knight’s tomb.

The knight rests above the tomb, hands in prayerful position,

a sword, the length of his body,

lies along the side of the tomb.

Three swords float by a stained glass window

Prompts from this image suggest a time of required reflection

Being cut off …

or removed from everyday life

is happening

No matter what

The knight the sword and the tomb are yellow

‘submit to rest … and heal’

Auckland is locked in level 3

They need permits to leave their city limits

And are not to meet with each other

Christchurch is level 2

we need to log when and where we have been

and distance ourselves … when we meet

and there’s a world outside

                                           Nathan Pohio’s two channel video

                                                Let it be to a Lofty Mountain  (53:33)

                                               Opens in the Great Hall of the Arts Centre

to a socially distanced audience

and one person in a mask

I know this person but do not speak

new rules … unsure

others without masks speak with each other loudly until the lights dim

It is a silent work

                                                               though              

Tristan Dingeman is performing

a Response

Speakers

amplifiers

pedals

and a guitar stand beside two

rectangle screens

The guitar sets harmonics in loops

A cadence wash leaves space for melody

a Response at an opening

banner headline to engage

the artwork stands naked

before an audience

go hard or go home

                                                              The work is positioned towards the back wall

                                                               of the Great Hall                

Above it a grand stained glass window

Solid in late winter evening darkness

Catches ribbon shafts when

the video begins becomes one with it

two screens

close readings of geological deposits and forms

move right to left and we are

either walking forwards passing or

standing planted as time and space leave

Rectangles of solid rock                        

                                                               I am directed back to the Four of Swords

A lady quietly stands and leaves

cushion under her arm

an apologetic silhouette

among the dark clothed seated

one hundred

a timeless tomb unfolds

a communications tower intersects

briefly

potential to be a sharp directional permanency

melts into geological time

we melt into Nathan time

fifty-two minutes and thirty-three seconds

a Doomsday timekeeper

In a Covid restructure of business as usual

we in the Great Hall are coloured yellow

Resting to heal

3 Swords float above

In the harmonic Response

^***^

Writhing, head first followed by shoulder then torso, my figure finds a way under the mesh.

                I contract again,

        finding a final push through my shoulder.

        The crisp air hits my skin.

I allow my elbow to crank,

                        the outer edge of my palm pulls against the fabric.

        The fabric folds underneath my weight.

I am released to a room;

        wrong in my own conclusion of its appearance.

                                                        I enjoy the scheme.

                                                        Blue, dusty light orange, clean white lines glinting at me.

                        I trace them with my index finger.

I decide I am amongst the clouds,

That some great painter has been here,

That these impressions are well conceived,

And,

Come to think of it,

These images are familiar after all,

A replica of canvases my friend sent me photos of asking for advice.

                                                        This creative cognition slows.

                                                        A shift to the observational,

to the analytical.

                                                        Moving from prisms held in my imagination,

to others lived.

        I rack my brain, wrecking my calm

                                The letter,

                                        it’s fractured considerations.

                                Walking up the drive,

                                        it’s weight felt in my hands.

                                The moment of hesitation,

                                                        followed by slapping it down to the table.

And turning now, to an overall view of the room,         

                                                        my stomach sinking at it’s connotations.  

Wrangling images, a shift from the imagined to the real.

        Writing of the reflection of light,

                                                set against stone.

        It’s coolness, spaciousness, liquidity,

        sitting there around me not fully acknowledged.

                                                Light grey set against darker grey.

                                                                Grey lines, intact, or soft fractures.

Regaining myself in the observational, now.

In all, considering the nature of prisms

        that hold themselves within my cognition

        brought on by and appealing to multiple senses

        at times solid, others wraithlike

        coming and going

        as an idea

        as an experience

        aligned with events

        and not least,

the variety of emotions all these sets hold

Colophon

Avian Loop , Issue 2

©Avian Loop 2020        

Published in September of 2020

Otautahi, Aotearoa

Avian Loop is produced by the monthly art writing group first established by The Physics Room Contemporary Art Space in 2017.

Writers and editors for issue two include but are not limited to:

James Hope

Hamish Petersen

Georgy Tarren-Sweeney

Daniel Shaskey

Kosta Bogoievsky

Natalie Kittow

Designer:

Daniel Shaskey

Typefaces:

Avara is a collaborative font initiated by Raphaël Bastide and published by VelvetyneType Foundry. MT Grotesque is designed by Frank Hinman Pierpont.

Printer:

Angus Donaldson

Correspondence:

Avian Loop

PO Box 22 351

Otautahi, 8013