Arteles Catalogue 2023-2020

Resident in Snow
for the Arteles cohort – March '23
Some things never change. Impermanence,
flow. The artists here are making fractures:
things construct yet brittle. Volcanos made of
snow, sweating from their interior fires.
Collages weaved from yesterday's news.
Landscape studies of Dali-dripping woods.
Marks are being set on past pages
by a poet of loss. When even those do not gel,
he sets his feet in the ice instead. Slides.
On silent days, only one thing is truly unsaid.
Something like: ouch.
Or: oh, the restless stoppage.
The freight-speed itinerary of cancellations.
On sharing night, we freeze our work,
best we can. But slides are slipped. Eyes lit.
For a pot is struck with a wooden spoon
by a woman dancing through the halls.
It's an emergency of magnetism, so we unthaw,
meeting ourselves in the clear night,
standing close but apart, to peer North.
Coats half-zipped. Hoping to pupate.
We are desperate for it, that beauty
we have heard is ours. So we hang jaws
ready to drink it. The Aurora. Dim show,
morphing memory of moss in bore winds.
Until it flickers out. Is lost. Disappears
temporarily. And then we're sure we saw it.
We're quite sure, by our loss, that we had it.