Red — first and before everything, red. Strands of holiday tinsel radiate from a single point on a white cinderblock wall, fanning up into a partly clouded blue sky and casting their thin grey doubles down across the brick. The general reading offers itself at once: a discount storefront, a seasonal decoration, the tired gaiety of American commerce. Anyone could name it.
Yet what holds me is smaller and more foolish: the sparkle caught in a few of the plastic filaments, a cheap glitter that pierces the description and will not be filed away. It is the sort of detail that has nothing to do with meaning and everything to do with having been there — a shine that says someone climbed a ladder to make a bare wall festive, and then went inside.
The archival pigment print on Dibond, from End Sends Advance Warning, keeps the tinsel forever mid-gesture, exploding and hanging at once. There is a violence to the radiating lines, a starburst that is also a wound in the calm masonry. I read the sign and I feel the shine, and the two do not reconcile; the photograph holds them apart, festive and forlorn, the way certainty and grief sometimes share a single afternoon, indifferent to one another.
Red — first and before everything, red. Strands of holiday tinsel radiate from a single point on a white cinderblock wall, fanning up into a partly clouded blue sky and casting their thin grey doubles down across the brick. The general reading offers itself at once: a discount storefront, a seasonal decoration, the tired gaiety of American commerce. Anyone could name it.
Yet what holds me is smaller and more foolish: the sparkle caught in a few of the plastic filaments, a cheap glitter that pierces the description and will not be filed away. It is the sort of detail that has nothing to do with meaning and everything to do with having been there — a shine that says someone climbed a ladder to make a bare wall festive, and then went inside.
The archival pigment print on Dibond, from End Sends Advance Warning, keeps the tinsel forever mid-gesture, exploding and hanging at once. There is a violence to the radiating lines, a starburst that is also a wound in the calm masonry. I read the sign and I feel the shine, and the two do not reconcile; the photograph holds them apart, festive and forlorn, the way certainty and grief sometimes share a single afternoon, indifferent to one another.