Settle into a slightly uncomfortable position. For example, hold your arms above your head as if you’ve just finished the ascent of a rollercoaster and are about to begin the descent, or bite your cheek hard the way some nervous people do when they’re nervous, or cross all of your fingers like a child desperately hoping to avoid retribution for telling a lie. Most meditations suggest the meditator find a neutral posture, but neutrality is a halcyon myth for our species. So, today, we’re not even going to pretend, not even going to kid ourselves. Click here to meditate more.
Read The Eleventh Chapter Of Gideon Jacobs' & Brad Phillips' Serial Novella →
People emphasize the importance of beginnings and endings. One always wants to “get off on a good foot,” “go out with a bang,” “start strong,” “leave them wanting more,” etc, etc. These truisms are, at their core, about manipulation, and manipulation is, at its core, about control. If our “exquisite corpse serial novella” has taught you anything, which it really shouldn’t have, it’s probably that control is for suckers. Click here to read more.
Jasmine Nyende: Crested Crane @ AA|LA Gallery In Los Angeles
Through conversation, meditation, and rediscovery of “lost pasts,” Jasmine Nyende uses art to explore and mediate her mother’s southern American roots and her father’s Ugandan genealogy. Incorporating paintings, fiber arts, performance, poetry, meditation, spoken word, and embroidered ready-to-wear clothes, Nyende manifests an alluring confluence of body, identity, and ancestry.
Crested Crane materializes through Nyende’s use of fibers and manifests a particular mending of personal identity that echoes throughout the body of work. For Nyende, art is a way to speak to ancestors while asserting her own individuality. Specifically, the crocheted and knitted works relate to the American history of Black female labor in the fiber arts. The web of soft textiles act as connective tissue, binding the vibrant images and colorways into a complex yet comprehensive family narrative that would otherwise be inaccessible. Crested Crane is on view through December 14 at AA|LA 7313 melrose avenue, Los Angeles. photographs courtesy of the gallery