Real Timing (2024)
Inkjet and Watercolor on Hanji Paper.
♥ ♥ ♥

Went out last night and it was good, that simultaneity of a lot and nothing happened, where I looked at art, talked to people, drank beers, moved from one place to another, rode the tube. I left my place in the early evening, grabbed a cheeseburger that I ate on the bus and a Jamaican tonic wine that I drank on the tube, and got to Hackney a little earlier than I'd preferred so I walked around for a little bit, smoked a cigarette, there was a beautiful double rainbow, and I tried to digest the locale. Went to a shop and grabbed a Sapporo tall boy, later it came up in conversation, the shape and the size of it, G, who I met while taking the lift up, remarked that it was phallic right after I called the curves of it a little feminine. It was while we were looking at one of the works in the show, a piece of wood cut out from a shelf with stickers posted all over it. The stickers were from different hotels decades ago and the artist explained that her uncle collected them, not by traveling because he was a teenager in Communist Poland, but by writing to these hotels and asking for promotional materials, and this is what remains of that. It was fascinating detritus, the design on many of the stickers, like the Hilton Abu Dhabi and another hotel in Kuwait still linger in my mind, and what also comes to mind is Fassbinder capturing those Moroccan hotels in Fox and His Friends. I guess there's a certain density to it that I like, but also its existence as a found object of sorts, but still a found object that had to be rendered by removal, by an act of cutting, and it was mounted on top of two door handles, one with keys in them. In the other room were 24 plates with paint to delineate hours, one for each time zone, rendering them into clocks without hands. The arrangement was haphazard, scattered across the floor, making it a bit of a landmine situation if you wanted to traverse the room, but they worked well with the tiles on the floor. In the kitchen was the last piece, another clock made of the tops of perfume bottles built onto the wall.

I was talking to A who runs the place and she mentioned something about an amount of selling out and I realized how that notion exists in the UK in comparison to the US, cultural differences blah blah blah, and people kept asking me how I knew about the gallery and sometimes I'd start by talking about another gallery and overlap in spheres across cities, but often times people said they didn't know the spaces in other cities, so I switched to talking about my ongoing interest in the lineage and history of artist-run spaces, something that is true, it's how I've learned about ~Contemporary Art~ the most so to speak, you look at documentation, you see what shows galleries have shown, you try to grasp for an understanding through that. G made a joke about how I needed to write a blog about this, a guide to the apartment galleries scattered across the world, a traveller's guide so to speak, and it's funny because he'd just met me.

Later in the kitchen I met A2, who has the same name as A, and G, and their friends O and H, and it was great, we got to chatting and had a lot to chat about. I've really liked A2's work for a couple of years now, I found her stuff on soundcloud at first and then found her website through that and I really liked her sensibilities as they moved between sound and video and drawing and painting, how she moved between these forms in a very seamless way in terms of how the works functioned - oblique and beautiful. On the other end, I didn't realize how much she liked my work, she said that she and G really loved my soundcloud stuff and asked when I was releasing more stuff, and I talked to G about some of the tracks he's put up on soundcloud too. Moments of note from the hours gone by: A2 asks me about TMAR and I tell her about him assaulting J at an opening and she says she likes J's work. I tell her about the waterboarding idea and she thinks it'd be a funny show. We're talking about college but I'm saying "Uni" and A2 asks me if they say that in the states and I say no I'm just assimilating and code switching. I take a guest shot during a game of pool and have a decent strike on the cue ball but can't knock anything in. There were no numbers on the pool balls, just 2 sets of colors, except for the 8 ball. A girl asked me if I'd read anything recently that fucked me up and I mentioned the Manto but didn't get into it - she mentioned a book about Iraq but didn't get into it. I think about how much talking happened, where do the words go once they dissipate, some into memory yes, but only the smallest amount when there's so many things being said. We talked about gossip and there was gossip, I talked about how I liked gossip and how it functioned, A2 brought it up after I talked about the whole Twombly Donnelly thing and the work I want to make but can't, but also how if I were to show that work I'd want to elide presenting that whole context, she was saying it'd still exist because I'd have talked about it enough and people would then talk about it, it's similar to how I was walked through the Arcadia Missa show with an explanation even if the press release didn't have that many words. I talked with A about the White ppl think I'm radical show and she said it was a Moment when it happened. I've been thinking about this Ot7 Quanny line constantly for the past two days:

"I got paid for a show, then bought some work yea cuz I'm Trapped Out"

I made a video from a moment last night, where A2 was cutting cake on the tracks of the tube stop, layering in footage of a walk through the medina, a television playing a soap in a coffee shop, and the ocean meeting cliffs in Rabat. I kept parts of the audio as well, mixing it with the second "Max B type beat" I made, and I titled the video "VVS Lemonade (coming soon)", the title of the project I want to drop soon, but I also liked how the paranthetical brackets made "coming soon" into a sort of separated message. I went through A2's soundcloud likes yesterday and found this kp0p track that really blew my mind hearing it here. The VVS Lemonade title comes from a song he did with stunny that was deleted off kp0p's soundcloud in 2020 when they beefed out about something. I talked about that bay area scene, I talked about A3 and our friendship, I feel like I did so much talking. It'll even out, I'll be speaking much less over the coming weeks. I texted the kp0p track to C and called him one of the greatest working artists in America. the song's called "i aint never coming back home" - this universal homelessness, brought me back to living on San Pablo ave thinking about San Pablo's Finest, and I wonder where kp0p is now. if he'll ever go back to Richmond. I met this girl from Albany in Romania and she was saying no one could afford to stay there anymore, her parents divorced and her mom lived in Bulgaria, she didn't know what she was doing and would drink vodka everyday to pass the time. i loop 'i aint never coming back home' and pack up for another flight