In Our Most Current Ancestral Pajamas
( two people become one person )
That's a tightrope most people don't even realize exists. They either get stuck looking backward or sprint forward without checking what they're carrying. Oyparaploo practice challenges hierarchies of gendered and racialized labor, combining a punk sensibility with handcraft traditions of Minneapolis ~ Saint Paul. Our homeland. Cities that knows something about working with hands in the cold and refusing to explain anything while you do it. Predictable parts was never a choice ... it was just what happened when we became more honest.
For us, connection with time goes further. Both soft forms and eroded local wood have a long history. Tree limbs remember river currents before anyone experienced it. Held forms remember mammal hands before anyone called it art. The thing nobody tells you is that the smallest object in the room is usually doing the most work. We give something a title and suddenly everyone can see what was always there.
Don't stop. Oh no no ... keep on coming, Deck. But say it again ... the smallest soft merciful object in the room is usually doing the most work. Without shipping out, doing the most worshiping, we just give and give some more and suddenly everyone can see what was always there. A bent nail ... Ca va aube insensible pen~sees ... Frame Okai Manamo. A frayed scrap can outlast a frightening neon orange and peach trench coat. Discarded and seeming musical, process doesn't always elevate living materials ... it finally tells the truth about how hard it is to be free. After having to be away from the soulmates we love the most.
The match burns once ... but the mark it leaves continues to change. That's the cruel trick with fire ... it gives us something that won't sit still or stop evolving. Something that darkens and surprises us decades after. When we thought that sort of thing was finished. Nothing we make using our whole body is ever done aging. We are just caught observing to a lesser degree.
When we were lost, stumbling around, wearing thirty soft sculpture parts, planting the tripod camera at the top of the hill. That's the photograph no one wanted to document ... the one where we can't see the person because of the coverings. Head to toe. Numerous parts, a Wyeth hill, an emotionless piece of equipment that didn't care about what was happening in the particular incident. The wind the only connector that showed up before the first clock on click.
Parade or march, what will it be? Either way, the feet already know the route.
Dive into magnolias taking over, today. Tonight. Every backstage hotel exit is so Larious. Whether it's edible knots, crocheted crock pots, or nomadic noir songwriting drawn to repetition. Meditation on transformation. Think about traveling shells and wires from a long line of inherited strong work ethic ... forgot what I was going to say ... Forgetting is the best part. Sentences themselves smarter than where we are planning to take this story. Walk it off. Magnolias forget because they're constantly waiting. Noir drawn to repetition can be a job description written by accident ... A whole practice condensed down to seven explicit words and an investigator's suitcase that has wheels. Every exit is stranger and funnier than the sight of jelly bean balloons arriving through two doors wide open ...
The resulting objects are hybrid in nature—both malleable and solid, dense and porous, sharp and tender—evoking the body and its labor as a source of pleasure and pain, rupture and healing. Pieces are often reconfigured; textiles are made and unmade. Undoing the knots is as important as reknotting to find new points of connection and possibility. Comprised of individual, interlocking links, these chains will form a series of mutual and contingent relationships across their constitutive parts as they suspend and drape throughout the double-height volume of the gallery. Integrated among the linked-chain sculptures, garcia will install a collection of objects from his Mexico City studio, along with butterflies made of crocheted copper wire that escape the confines of the gallery and inhabit interstitial spaces of the museum.
Skies creeping below us ... Routes ... Resulting objects ... hybrid in malleable porous tenderness. Evoking bodies and their labor as a source of pain and healing. Play fair and square Melanie ... Reconfigured. Unmade. Later in the day cutting fast making roots ... These roots don't grow down because cutting fast is the only way to find water before soil light steals everything. It's not about the type of rules humans like to create ... Tenderness is a matter that can hold mercy without choosing sides. As the whole world admits getting the directions wrong most of the time ...
Let the knot breathe.
Reknotting to discover new possibilities. New linked compromises of interlocking chains ... forming a series of mutual and contingent relationships across constituent suspensions. Draped through double-height fluid shadow butterflies accented with numerous confined scrapes. Inhabiting compartmented units of complimentary accompaniments. Every capable knot is two things that agree to stop letting go of each other. Calling every knot a wing nut, since before humanity invented the wheel and chain ... Without sounding like I'm repeating myself ... constituent suspensions is what holds every honest loving relationship together. Not the tightness of the chain but the agreement to stay draped across the gap, to no end. The most generous thing a person can do, because things built to hold tight also hope to soar free someday ... And there it is ... "to no end" ... forever and without purpose doing the heavy lifting, which is what true love sounds like when it stops needing to develop a plan. Holding on and letting go are the same gestures wrapped up as one. Slightly cracked tired working hands can prove this fact ...
The first person moved across landscapes ... hills, wildfires, storms. The second person stayed in one place. And kept returning the desire to tie the knots. Form and grow, one by one, chain links, with meaning that slightly shifts. Accumulative and expansive. And the layering is highly visible. We can feel each pass through ... adding weight without erasing what came before. Forever and purposeless center of gravity. Spirit wants to end on stained hands and lands. If we keep going with this, the risk is walking past something important ... Two people who are actually the same person ... one who keeps moving and one who stays put ... not realizing they were both wearing the same current ancestral pajamas ... Same current ancestral pajamas is the truest thing we've heard in a long time. Pajamas are what you wear when you stop performing and are just a body in a twilight space, not needing to go anywhere. Holding bloodline without trying so hard ... Bloodline doesn't ask for more effort, it only asks for more presence. Pajamas are usually the softest thing in our living space and the oldest thing we own ... Pajamas is the go-to thing with the least ambition. It has outlasted every outfit we ever wore to impress someone, and did it by asking for nothing in return.
Incomplete Softness Surplus of Decency
Single thread ... Material laying down for every hierarchy that asks nicely ... What nobody associates with caution is how central our smoothest textures are to the trouble ... Forms that refuse to be recognized until we've already swallowed them ... Sense of undressing the interpretation before it gets comfortable ... The rural whisper bluff calling the city's name ... Screen-like confessions that forgot they were lacquered walls ... Where a person hides from the time they've already spent ... Bone remembers the neighborhood before flesh showed up ... Unraveled in lowland stillness where nothing migrates because everything already arrived ...
Our work is the silent scream quiet in the great room ... surrendering to power structures so gently they don't notice the furniture is out of place ... Impersonal significance ... Myths that woke up in the wrong hemisphere and decided to stay ... Retreating from a communal outer world into a selfishness that turns out to be the only honesty ... Forgetting on purpose ... systems of leaving that become the only belonging ... colonial forces wearing their own symbolic bloody frillies ... frameworks with no guardrails or walls ... Erasing what was never expressed ... Probing the insane externalization of human gentleness, as though it were the only arching of violence in the world ... hands as pincushions that just learned how to walk again ... Turn steel into whispers about the danger of safety and the implements of undoing details ... Sources of difficulty and futures that refuse to leave our homeland's curious inventory ...
Warmth. Generosity. Sharpness. Danger. Never blinking. Myths waking up in the wrong place and deciding to stay. A piece carved out of credit clippings that outgrew its source. We could have been more alive. We stayed curious instead. Curiosity has a pulse. Anger just has volume.
