Deformations I
2025
wood, steel, fabric, plaster, cement, lotus root, binder rings, hardware, cotton tape, nylon strap, epoxy resin
46 x 132 x 50 inches
on view
@lylesandking through november 8
this is my dispatch from hangzhou, where i observe my grandmother lose her bearings. convention pathologizes the confusion wrought by dementia, but there is truth in that folded perception of the world. time is a falsehood. we invent time in order to contour living to stakes that we can bear. when i first started making sculptures with these upended figures, i was listening to bach and thinking about fugues: the inversions of musical counterpoint, and, psychiatrically, the mind in flight. the patient in a dissociative fugue is given to unexpected travel or wandering. my grandmother, lucid until earlier this year, started sleepwalking. her dreams took her to her vivid past; Communist red guards roused her from bed and sent her into the field to till farmland. in the present day, at dawn, the security guard of her apartment complex found her stumbling around holes she had clawed in the dirt.
so she has deteriorated since then. “deteriorated.” i sense her getting close to something. regularly she mistakes her daughters, my aunt and mother, for her own mother. might that be a comfort? it has been many decades since my grandmother saw her mother.
i came to china to witness the spectacular fade of this woman who raised me. i have no other business here. i spend most of the day horizontal, diligently maintaining the depressive trappings of this uncertain year. following decisions at once arbitrary and made at my wits’ end, i went off my antidepressants, 12 years of birth control, booze, and cigarettes. today i climbed to the peak of 北高峰 and made my prayers to guanyin. i watch my grandmother, tiny, brave, and starry-eyed, muddle the line between observed reality and cosmic truth, and i turn myself inside out.
