Work Text:
Close your eyes. A lover is standing too close to focus on. Leave me blurry and fall toward me with your entire body. Lie under the covers, pretending to sleep, while I’m in the other room. Imagine my legs crossed, my hair combed, the shine of my boots in the slatted light . . .
. . . We have not touched the stars, nor are we forgiven, which brings us back to the hero’s shoulders and the gentleness that comes, not from the
absenceofviolence, but despite the abundance of it. The lawn drowned, the sky on fire, the gold light falling backward through the glass of every room . . .
. . . Is that too much to expect? That I would name the stars for you? That I would take you there? The splash of my tongue melting you like a sugar cube?
Do I have to tie your arms down? Do I have to stick my tongue in your mouth like the hand of a thief, like a burglary, like it’s just another petty theft . . .
. . . Here is the cake, and here is the fork, and here’s the desire to put it inside us, and then the question behind every question: What happens next? The way you slam your body into mine reminds me I’m alive . . .
Roll over and let me fuck you till you puke, Henry, you owe me this much, you can indulge me this at least, can’t you?
. . . I was away, I don’t know where, lying on the floor, pretending I was dead. I wanted to hurt you but the victory is that I could not stomach it. We have swallowed him up, they said. It’s beautiful. It really is. I had a dream about you. We were in the gold room where everyone finally gets what they want . . .
I am singing now while Rome burns. We are all just trying to be holy. My applejack, my silent night, just mash your lips against me. We are all going forward. None of us are going back.
Excerpts from Snow and Dirty Rain and Wishbone in Crush by Richard Siken. Copyright © 2004. Yale University Press. All rights reserved.
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Commentary
Rather like the piece, my artist’s commentary got too long for the End Notes, so I present it here in the work text instead:
From its inception, this project has been extremely ambitious both conceptually and technically; as time went on, its scope and scale only snowballed as it were.
As the due date drew nigh, I found myself simultaneously desperate for the project to be over but also never wanting it to end. And, on several occasions, it felt rather as though the piece and I were non-conning each other—both of us screaming Stop!, but neither of us willing to listen or back down. 🤣 We both kept rolling along anyway.
The single most challenging undertaking—incorporating the poetry text—also proved the most rewarding due to its integral metavisual symbolism. I knew that I wanted to physically represent the entire poem even before I started sketching imagery; however, achieving this required extensive logistical troubleshooting.
After identifying a home printing solution, I cut and adhered all 98 lines by hand, a process which can only be described as agonizing. 🤪 One might say that there was a method to my madness (I see you, Jeremy 👋😛); infusing literal pain, sweat, and tears into the work felt appropriate to the subject.
The pain continued as I developed the piece. (One also might say that I’m an artistic masochist. 😆) Collage is inherently an exercise in killing one’s darlings—to create, then to destroy, in order to create anew; it is perhaps my favorite medium for this very reason. Nonetheless, I frequently had to remind myself the value in doing so much work for something ultimately destined to be covered up.
For covering up—hiding, secrecy, repression—embodies the entire thesis of Roman’s, and indeed the entire Roy family’s collective trauma.
We all put on layers to hide ourselves: self deprecating humor; “jokes” that aren’t; alternate histories told to us that we repeat over and over until we almost believe them ourselves. We overwrite our pasts until they become illegible, incomprehensible. Yet underneath the surface the marks remain, indelibly shaping who we are and everything that we attempt to build atop them.
In the process, things that might have once been beautiful—namely childhood and sexuality—are irrevocably damaged and warped by these layers of trauma. Love becomes fear. Light becomes darkness. Pleasure becomes pain. Beauty becomes ugliness.
Of all your likes, I most viscerally resonated with the phrase sexual trauma and all its ugliness
. Ugliness is a thrilling prompt for me, a visual artist, who has always thrived in the precarious zone between aesthetic and kitsch.
There are many words that might describe this piece—garish; gaudy; glittercore; Lisa Frank projectile vomit (affectionate). Restrained is decidedly not one of them (unless, of course, you’re referencing the collars and leashes! 😜).
I may (may?!) have gone a tad (tad?!) over the top with all the… everything. 😅 The busyness aims to transport the viewer into Roman’s claustrophobic, overstimulated headspace and then trap them there right along with him; caged in the inescapable omnipresence of his abuse.
The (false) dichotomy between omnipresence—or abundance
—and absence
also steered how I chose to represent Logan. Directly, we only see a part of him—a very important part, mind you. (Trust me, I have never rendered a penis so lovingly! 😝) We see him from a child’s eye view; the face of our father that we know most intimately.
Yet indirectly, the hand of God-the-Father-Logan pervades the piece. He is Schrödinger’s present. He resides up in the clouds, behind the curtain—the story underneath the story
—orchestrating and dictating (dick-tating?) everything that we see.
To see. Above all, this piece is about seeing, and being seen. We start at the top, as Roman looking out. As we descend, others are looking at us. Finally, we find ourselves looking in from without; watching ourselves from outside our own bodies as an auto-voyeur.
Siken urges us to Close [our] eyes.
We do not want to look. We cannot bear to see the truth. We are told—and so we tell ourselves—that It did not happen.
None of it happened.
And therefore, it doesn’t exist. It isn’t real. It’s nothing. Nothing at all…
But—
Also like Roman, we must look. We are compelled—both externally, by others, and internally, by ourselves—to look.
With open eyes to our nakedness and shame, we attend; once blind, now we see.
This is perhaps best encapsulated by Florence + The Machine in the song Light of Love, which I recalled as I was in the finishing stages of this project, and with which I will leave you:
In some ways that was simpler, being too fucked up to see
I didn’t have to wake up to the world that was around me
And now we are awake and it seems too much to take
I want to close my eyes because I fear my heart will break
I want to look away
I want to look away
I want to look away
I must not look awayDon’t go blindly into the dark
In every one of us shines the light of love