The (slow, intimate, eternal) Polemics of Pulling
Lawless Imagination: Society, Aesthetic Surprise, and the Extended Encounter is found in a radical shift in Howe's new work.
Running through all my work are the seams of things being healed from rupture, the scar of having been brought together before.
And now, as the rabbit skin glue dries and the Belgian linen strains against the tacks, the sutures show, working the other way, pulling the material back together.
The forces that pull bodies apart and the incredible strength and resources it takes to draw them back together is the fusion engine of my work - these forces are always an event; they occur almost simultaneously: pulling together, pulling apart. Anyone who has ever tried to bring the edges of something back together knows about suturing. Anyone who has felt the rupture building and building only to happen in our bodies, in our lives, knows about triage.
These polemic forces destroy political bodies, corporeal bodies, bodies of ideology, and geology. These forces are always political. They are not always negative, punitive, or unwelcome.
Every rending demands a repair, every repair leaves a mark, and every mark informs the future; in every future, inevitably, the rending occurs again.
As a queer mother of two transgender women, I must see this polemic as a beautiful thing; our resilience, our aspiration, our insistence that we can and should be good still exists – we still reach for the divine, even just as a fleeting feeling, we still sting with the sublime, the imagination still recoils at the limit of its boundary when it reaches mortality: scale, scope, duration. I accept the Rupture is necessary, sometimes from an abundance and overfullness, and sometimes from a rending, a wound-making.
The work, therefore, examines the rupture/suture, the tearing/healing, and the infinite moments in between, this pulling polemic of aspiration and dissolution of spirit, this cleaving to of social bias and the cleaving twain.
The work is slowly researched, slowly built, in sensitive response, and slowly abided within, recording with fingertips and breath the drawn-out duration of the aesthetic encounter.
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