our song, in twenty-six parts

My new show opens tomorrow night at Daniel Cooney Fine Art in New York. Here’s what I wrote for it:

Every history is built of bits and pieces, an incomplete puzzle forming a picture just clear enough to see. With a few well-defined corners, a recognizable building, a credible chunk of sky, we figure we can fill in the rest. Any gaps and spaces still missing, well, certainly they only prove what we already know, don’t they?
Our Song in Twenty-Six Parts is a personal history told in scraps and fragments, some found, some made. It is a love story of sorts, told over and over, embodied in relics and images from a parallel history of photography. Inspired in part by old medical photographs, it is not intended to revive some older and weirder time, but to use my own present point of view to tease out from the past the obsessions and desires – imagined or not – that match and justify mine.
There is a strange gut reaction to viewing old photographs, especially medical photographs – something truly visceral that I just don’t think happens with drawings or paintings. When looking at pictures of bodies, even parts of bodies, it is difficult not to identify, project, empathize, stare. I think, This body is my body (except when it’s yours…) To look at old photographs like these, or sometimes even ones that just look old, I wonder how these little objects could inspire such fear, such lust. After all, isn’t it just chemistry?


Oh, and here’s my Rob Brezny horoscope for the week:

Aquarius Horoscope for week of May 9, 2013

“I know not what my past still has in store for me,” testified the Indian spiritual poet Tukaram. I believe most of us can say the same thing, and here’s why: The events that happened to us once upon a time keep transforming as we ripen. They come to have different meanings in light of the ever-new experiences we have. What seemed like a setback when it first occurred may eventually reveal itself to have been the seed of a blessing. A wish fulfilled at a certain point in our history might come back to haunt us later on. I bring up these ideas, Aquarius, because I think you’re primed to reinterpret your own past.

One thought on “our song, in twenty-six parts

  1. hi. you are amazing as usual. and i know people smarter than me (sally for starters) will get even more out of your work than i do. that said, i love it. you’re so talented. bisou.

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