W2S Windows to Sculpture Series, Sculpture Center Cleveland(2016)

Like a River (2016)

This installation was an ad hoc exhibition that I mounted in conjunction with a a project involving dance by Kora Radella and music by Randy Coleman: a collaboration which inaugurated the first year of a special W2S (Windows to Sculpture) performance/collaboration series by The Sculpture Center in Cleveland, beautifully coordinated by the amazing Ann Albano. A recording of a piano piece by Coleman, which shimmers with its ever-strange and subtle rhythmic shifts, played, while I sat between two lit wooden boxes, upon which two dancers moved, encased by white sculpted silk. I ritualistically washed pieces of slate I pulled from a large, lighted white bowl, placing each on a smaller light box next to me as the performance proceeded.

The texts that found me for the installation are below - one, an ekphrastic poem I wrote (in response to a Sol Lewitt drawing), which I inscribed onto the wall and over the slate tiles around half of the gallery in Like A River, and the final passage of Norman McLean’s great short novel, A River Runs Through It- which I had used more directly in a previous installation (Incantation, 2012). The 19 silk forms may act as sentinels, or ghosts. They and the slate tiles hold the memory of resists and retracings.

This Edge 

an ekphrastic poem in response to Sol LeWitt’s Wall Drawing #1222 (Scribbles: Curved Horizontal Bands), 2007. From the collection of the Oberlin College Allen Memorial Art Museum, Oberlin, Ohio. 

for my daughter

Before our deafening loss,
I beheld this graphite drawing,

noting its tiny hatches made by many hands

over many days,

its composite, ample gestures undulating skyward,

at once contained and infinite beyond all measure of its containment.

Pattern is intrinsically self-referential,

proposing a continuum, as it presses against the edge:

of the painting, of the woven fabric, of the musical rhythm,

the roiling waves, the circling tree rings, the pulsing nebulae.

Pattern traverses the edge of a thing and the airy universe,

a peripheral echo of steps and marks and minutes

describing the parameters that make a day,

or four days, or nineteen years, a life.

And, standing here, then,

asking myself wordless questions about what my own hands

might make next,

not an atom of me knew

that these lines’ vibrating whispers and indescribable assertions

were a path to knowing, a quiet communion

that would lead me to, now.

Now, when every question has only one reply: you.

Now, when I realize that you inhabit that delicate, thundering, in-between place, oscillating at the edge of a life

we made with you,

a greater life we imagined for you:

a life of daily reiterations of the ordinary, with scattered

sparks of the extraordinary.

Now, an answer as ephemera, or an alternate truth

that I can, still, only intimate.

I create small rituals around your memory:

Light a candle, draw meaning from repeated numbers, collect slate from a river, breathe in your garments, sleep on your pillowcase, place the weekly roses, kiss a wooden spoon.

Weave out and out and out to the edge of the warp.

Stitch, tie, immerse in dye, wash, rinse, untie, iron.

Leaf through images that sing again and again and again

the particulars of your dimple chin, deep eyes, apple breasts, willowy spine, and your varied glances: each a distillation

of your luminous, evolving selves.

How must I understand this new, attenuated pattern:

frayed, discordant, dissolving,

and wholly strange?

This rim, this edge, this border, this boundary:

There. Here.

You shimmer.

-Rebecca Cross, March 2013

Eventually, all things merge into one, and a river runs through it. The river was cut by the world's great flood and runs over rocks from the basement of time. On some of the rocks are timeless raindrops. Under the rocks are the words, and some of the words are theirs.

I am haunted by waters.

Norman Maclean, A River Runs Through It