Blog 1 — Adam Grossi

one / yarn

From within the existential crush of the Anthropocene I arrive at the gallery, gasping for air. It’s been your average hurtle through the urban: anxious timings, chaotic stimulation, indigestible pairings of wealth and depravation.

Inside, now. A space dimly lit and indeterminate. Isa Leal is offering us floor cushions. I plop.

A few hermetic instructions, hastily scrawled:

Be curious about transparencies
Read into text
Be with your body in space.

From the peripheral shadows Liz Ensz appears and sits beside me. They offer me a resonant moment of their gentle, piercing eye contact and thank me for coming. “Each friend,” Anais Nin observed, “represents a world in us, a world possibly not born until they arrive.” I think about this as I remember the strange nourishment of that moment together.

In the normative fabric Liz and I don’t have clear coordinates — not exactly the sustained intimacy of “friends” and also deeper than “acquaintances” — but in the queer weft we locate each other well, and differently, in our loops through shared terrain, discipline, and community.

Portrait of the artist as my friend. Chicago, 2022.

Liz has threaded Isa Leal and Skye Fort into an evening of performance in the exhibition space. Visitors are trickling in, and the room is beginning to bloom with animacy.

Isa addresses us, the audience, and begins a kind of somatic attuning. High squat with subtle pelvic gyrations, shoulder rolls, spinal wiggles. We are not a conventional audience, it turns out, but collaborators in whatever this is about to become. We can look through viewfinders, speak along with the vocal track, fiddle with the projector casting terrain forms onstage, and dance with the dancer. Orlando Johnson is off stage left, the sparse plucks of his mandolin weaving a slow trance soundscape. I’m initially skeptical that these disparate components will hold power. I am wrong.

Isa’s recorded voice enters the room:

If I hurt because you hurt me, it’s a threat
If I acknowledge that I have hurt someone I love, it’s a threat

The body resonates, somehow both ecstatic and agonized. Isa writhes, sweeps, shakes, roams.

Isa Leal performing *Never Passing (Always Passing)*, 2024.

As the performance builds, the bodies around me began awakening, slithering through and around those of us still stuck in audience mode. The language invites trance through its circularity, its meaning cast and recast, hinging upon a flip between “threat” and “gift.” A healing spell, but one in which pain is a necessary ingredient.

Intermission. We walk into the main gallery space, where Liz Ensz directs us to Enclosure (1-7). They reach into the fluorescent fishing net and distribute dense, HDPE casts of conch shells. It is delightfully jarring to be invited to hold a sculpture. Soon, these casts will be our practice supports.

*Liz Ensz, Enclosure (1-7), detail view.*

*Liz Ensz distributes cast conch shells.*

A few minutes later we return to our seats. The stage’s backdrop is now a projection screen for You Are Made of Stardust and Microplastics: Meditation for Extinction, a collaboration between Skye Fort and Liz Ensz. Over soothing footage of ocean waves and nature scenes the narrator guides us in conceiving of consciousness at the lip of annihilation.

Liz Ensz + Skye Fort, You Are Made of Stardust and Microplastics:
Meditation for Extinction (still), 2024

The narrator instructs us to place the casts over our nose and mouth, and breathe. Ah, Enclosure. Taking shelter in the mist of my breath inside this polythylene shell evokes both the defense of a COVID mask and a vehicle for oxygen delivery.

Threat. Gift.

The evening deposits within me a dense tangle of insights and sensations. I began writing, unspooling. Writing is the mind’s footpath, the journey of thinking through. I don’t know where I’m going, but I fantasize that you’ll be there. The dream of the pleasure of our meeting becomes my compass.

two / warp

exhibition view: Liz Ensz, *NO GRIDS, NO MASTERS*

Liz has me thinking about the movement of my body as weaving. I’ve traversed the floor of this gallery many times, reshaping my sense of each work by changing the shape of my path through the room.

If I visualize each walkthrough from above, the wooden floor tiles become a loom. Flattening my traverse to the timeless grid, my path appears as a thread. My visit, a web spun of my seeking.

NO GRIDS, NO MASTERS:
a Post-Cartesian Experiment.

The title’s wordplay hits first, an echo of the hallowed liberation mantra, “No Gods, No Masters.” But what is so oppressive about grids? And what is the nature of this liberation struggle, exactly? These questions propel and direct us. Come, let’s run this Post-Cartesian Experiment.

I think we should start here:

Those lush textiles are called Natures (diptych). That strange shape between them? That’s our portal into the experiment, the archetypal tech of the Cartesian coordinate system: a grid unit. Except, it’s not.

Look at that right vertical streaking upward, obeying Euclidean guidelines until suddenly it isn’t. Your first thought is maybe this is accidental but the precision and attention to detail of everything around it swats that away. After a few passes through the loom of this exhibition, the realization hits: this wonky grid is the rune of our rebellion. The tension you feel as you watch that line veer? That’s the energy source that powers this room.

We could say that the heart of the grid is logic, but that’s more like the mind of the grid. The heart of the grid is actually weaving, the ancient human discipline, which itself is a reflection an earthen strategy that long predates our arrival.

At first the show seems paradoxical, as grids abound in a space that clearly declares them unwelcome. The exhibition statement clarifies:

NO GRIDS NO MASTERS is an exploration and contestation of the grid and the structured set of worldviews that are embedded in it.

Exploration and contestation. To take something apart, you need to build it first. This room is a scale model of a great conflict playing out within and all around us.

Let’s shift left to the textiles.

Liz Ensz, *Natures (diptych)*, 2024. detail view.

Natures welcomes us with the most conventional images in the exhibition, and this is the only one that contains a human figure. Let’s try standing directly in front of it.

So calming, right? Square composition with a circle in the center: this is the geometry of stillness. If we stand here long enough and soften our gaze, we can inhabit this body. Let’s visualize:

The air is warm enough that our legs are fully exposed, and we are reclining back into the earth. We are flanked by beloveds, or enjoying the quiet symphony of chosen solitude. Our bare feet relish the dry grit of the sand, and our knees rock lazily side to side, hypnotizing us into the dissolution of inter-being. These legs are earthworks, animate mounds reaching to support the splendor of the sky. We are drunk on sensation, mesmerized by the golden orb flirting with the horizon. Here we are at sunrise, sunset, and full moonrise simultaneously. Resting in the trance of timeless reflection.

This might be where the wild alchemy of Ensz’s practice begins: in relaxed contemplation. Natures is also an homage to the goal of this resistance movement: the reclamation of the pleasure of being.

three / weft

Liz Ensz, *LandGlitch_1,* 2023 — detail view.

The queer weft is a robin’s nest of discordant fragments, a bricolage shelter spun of righteous disavowal and visionary resilience. Ensz both embodies and represents it here, summoning a survival strategy in the collision of grid and weave. The Frontiers sculptures extrude this tension.

The queer weft is a robin’s nest of discordant fragments, a bricolage shelter spun of righteous disavowal and visionary resilience. Ensz both embodies and represents it here, summoning a survival strategy in the collision of grid and weave. The Frontiers sculptures extrude this tension.

Liz Ensz, *Frontiers*, 2024 — overhead view.

From the aerial view, the grid snaps into clarity. Upon bringing the gaze to the frontier’s horizon, that same grid melts, draping the surface like a net cast on choppy water. Wavy grids. Earthen pulsation. Oh, right: this mountain, like us, is vibrating, wobbling through spacetime. The earth mother, chewing her eternal meal.

Liz Ensz, *Frontiers*, 2024 — terrain view.

Keep exploring. Subterranean mirrors reveal hidden contours. Pennies have been punched through to create washers. Noticing their bronze shimmer takes me to the window curtain, where coins are suspended in the hand-dyed, hand-woven linen.

Liz Ensz, *Frontiers*, 2024 — subterranean view.

Suddenly, a copper pyramid materializes. I mean, it’s been there, but I’m at a point in the weave where I can see it.

Liz Ensz, *NO GRIDS NO MASTERS*, installation view.

Liz Ensz, *Enclosure (1-7)*, 2024 — detail view.

This penny grid is defined, but porous. The structure feels ethereal in the fabric, hanging over the dense pyramid like a weather pattern. Each coordinate, a lucky find.

The final sentence of the extensive materials list for Enclosure (1-7) is an understated mystery:

Materials to be added and removed throughout the exhibition.

The vagueness is just for us; my guess is Liz knows precisely what will transform, and when. Dimensions of this experiment remain obscure, encoded. What we can gather is that, while exhibition might be finished, Liz Ensz is not done weaving.

Liz Ensz, *Unorganized Territory*, 2023, 42 x 92 inches.

From the density and patience of these works we feel into the poise necessary to make them. This future casting is a slow, uncertain craft, and fragile minds are always vulnerable to the crush of despair. To defy the grid is easy. Courage and impulse collide in a bolt of knowing and we rip right through. The hard part is what comes next.

NO GRIDS NO MASTERS is not a solutions algorithm. It is a possibility matrix, a divination space for locating ourselves and each other in the unmapped spaces we find when we get free. And then, tenderly, slowly intuiting the structure between us.

LIZ ENSZ: NO GRIDS NO MASTERS: A POST-CARTESIAN EXPERIMENT is on view through May 26, 2024 at the Museum of Contemporary Art Arlington. Attend a free performance by Orlando Johnson and Matthew Williams as part of the exhibition on Saturday, May 11, at 6pm.

appendix

Learn more about the work of Liz Ensz, Isa Leal, and Skye Forte.

Orlando Johnson is raising money to build a barn on his ancestral land. I encourage you to read about it.

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