Paper Paper

I, who cut off my sorrows

like a woodcutter,

should spend my life in the mountains.

Why do I still long

For the floating world?

 

—Akazome Emon from Women Poets of Japan by Kenneth Koch and Ikuko Atsumi

 

 

 

The artists in this Spring exhibition are all experts at romping over the prairie lands with

delicacy and finesse, despite their burly hooves and meaty ways. They’re those exquisite

bison who somehow don’t trample the coneflowers and lupines. That is not to say they

are part of a herd. Rather that they make it look easy even though it is extremely hard.

The more tossed off this work appears at first glance, the more ponderous it becomes.

Casual perfection. Heavy duty intoxication may occur when looking at these works on

paper because this crew viscerally comprehends that slippery gradient between gloss and

rough trade. What appears to be ordered, coded, alchemical, and symbolic is extra good

medicine. And what appears to be slapdash, gestural, improvisational, washy, or

unsystematic is totally pitch-shifted to elevated power status because apparently we’re

still living in some nightmarish Wild West. IE We’re up against Trump and Prince just

died so maybe the talismanic image has to be lighter, messier, sunnier, more surreal,

more abstract, and more reckless than the average onerous homeopathic goop that a

monster would get stuck and melted in. Regular violently pithy gems, whether they

compile logic or revolt against it, worked before but lately are no match for potential hell

on earth. These works have a busted kind of authority that just might throw enough shade

on the jokers to elicit retreat.

 

The pieces vary radically but showcase fierce levels of craft and share just the right blend

of insolence and reverence. Formal; patterned; abstract; representative; impressionistic;

blobby; smooth; evil; cryptic; tripped out; ambient; strong; laconic; and fractured, but

never complacent.

In this shared spirit of precipitous attention, I’ve made a sentence collage from my

forthcoming story collection, because even text is a thing made of parts.

 

***

 

The neighborhood crack house was a delightful painted lady, a three-story pink Victorian

featuring hi-gloss mauve paint on its porch gingerbread, the turreted top-level round

room, and guesthouse.

 

*

 

Each noodle in a big, hot bowl of noodles has its own story.

 

*

 

When you jumped, it was not because you wanted to kill yourself.

 

*

 

As I descend the wooden railroad-tie staircase down to the blazing hot cove through the

bladderpod and sumac shrubs, my breasts disappeared.

 

*

 

One two three, one two three, the melancholic rhythm takes effect as I dream of an Italian

sandwich, salami layered inside a bread log.

 

*

 

When she is monthly (during her menstrual cycle) forced to leave her forest property for

vittles and sundry domestic & personal supplies, she walks to town on an immaculately

chipped footpath (of her own making) in her mighty steel-toed brown Danners,

admiringly inhaling the hallmark aromas her labor produces: muscular spices overlaid

with sharp fresh citrus tones.

 

*

 

I’m not proud to admit that I used to drive friends over to Phil Spector’s house to gawk at

the murder palace.

 

*

 

Get to the heart of things, don’t wait. Give as much love away as you can, you will lose a

lot in this life and things will suck most of the time but once in awhile that pirate booty

rains down upon you and you can party to Prince’s Dirty Mind all night and make up for

all the sad times.

 

-Trinie Dalton

 

 

Trinie Dalton has published six books that undulate between prose and visual art, most recently Baby

 

Geisha (Two Dollar Radio). Dalton also writes for artists’ book projects and monographs, most recently

 

for David Altmejd (Damiani), You Who Read Me Will Forever Be My Friends: Dorothy

 

Iannone (Siglio), Laura Owens (Rizzoli), and Abstract Video: The Moving Image in Contemporary Video

 

Art (UC Press). She teaches at Vermont College of Fine Arts. Find her at Sweettomb.com.

 

 

Donald Morgan (b. 1969, Cottage Grove, OR) has recently had solo exhibitions at Soo

 

Visual Arts Center, Minneapolis; Fourteen30 Contemporary, Portland; and Marylhurst Art

 

Gym, Portland. Group shows include the Portland2016 Biennial, curated by Michelle

 

Grabner; Traywick Contemporary, San Francisco; White Columns, New York; Gavin

 

Brown’s Enterprise,New York; Roberts & Tilton, Los Angles; International Art Objects;

 

Los Angeles; Karma International, Zurich; and the Palace of Fine Art; Cairo. Morgan

 

lives and works in Eugene, Oregon and is a member of Ditch Projects

 

 

Calvin Marcus (b. 1988, San Francisco) was recently the subject of solo exhibitions at

 

Peephole, Milan (2015); C L E A R I N G, New York (2015); Chin’s Push, Los Angeles,

 

(2014); and Public Fiction, Los Angeles (2014). His work has been featured in group

 

exhibitions internationally including Repainting the Image After Abstraction, White Cube,

 

London (2015); Le Musée Imaginaire, Lefebvre & Fils, Paris (2015); and Works on

 

Paper, Greene Naftali, New York (2015). Marcus lives and works in Los Angeles. He is

 

represented by David Kordansky.