I was excited to visit the recently concluded exhibition at Yancey Richardson in New York City of the artist Jenny Calivas, who was showcasing a series of photographs all centered on the same theme: taking a self-portrait while buried.
In the images, Calivas is submerged specifically in natural materials of coastal areas in Maine, including sand and mud. I don’t recall ever seeing anything exactly like the imagery before, which is an exciting quality, but it wasn’t just that facet of the artworks that proved appealing.
In these images, the self — Calivas’ self, specifically — is all-but-totally taken in by a blanket of downward pressure.
It struck me as an illustration of the consumption I feel is sometimes encountered when just trying to navigate existing as a single person in a single place at a time. The images were emotionally realistic.
As I was just sitting here thinking about it, I was at first disappointed by the mundanity of my thought that “the sand reminds me of social pressures” or something, but it’s not just about that.
Here, you experience what’s distinctly outside of you — the self, the individual person — as ravenously hungry and nearly totally consumptive. It simultaneously becomes, esoterically perhaps, part of — maybe not you per se, but at least “you” in the sense of the experienced “you,” the image that you put out.
Calivas, visual obfuscation aside, is still recognizably here. (She holds a trigger for the shutter above spots in which she is temporarily buried.)
And… the rest of this is going to be poetry I wrote while contemplating the photographs. I was excited to try this with a short rolodex of exhibitions.
Best wishes to the artist and the gallery!
Walking Buried
by Valerie Bright, spurred by photographs by Jenny Calivas
Ironic
Self, not within but under an earthen, breathing casket of
Decaying wood paneling.
Rattling thrift store shelves
Suddenly
Laying still.
The shiver, the shudder, the shutter, the shutter, the capture, the picture,
separate and somewhere else entirely, me but
Seen through the lens of a lens in a Sam's Club aisle,
is there anyone who even places, places the dirt?
The muddied, fellowship hall light bulbs in the dirt
Soil and mud from the leaky hose. Me, but all of this is
Shimmering, glimmering under the moon.
Stained glass oracles.
Prophets from a time not yet had and no longer present in front of the
historical church organ.
Ventricular cobblestones.
The enveloping pew, the deli slicer shiver.
The dry book, the intimidating carpet.
The kind wall, the sunny promise of a grocery store aisle.
Associative crowds, delirious messiahs.
Students in the green at the university I never actually attended, really.
Podiums, crowds I couldn’t even see. Speeches I couldn’t even give, mouth open and nothing but
A wonderful dinner in the movie theater at the end of the hallway.
It’s the holidays. And it's the stairwells, and the grocery bagged snack foods.
The sidewalk extends directly into the back of the church's fish market perched in a book.
Oh wow, what’s this?
Does the lord see even into the dirt, and through the crowds of people at the
Impossibly lit concert?
Sensation, excitement in their new. Infomercials, and natural, the serene steel. The
Landline is ringing. It’s echoing through the soil and asphalt.
Falling down the grocery store aisles, I find myself talking to a box of Ritz crackers and a
salted, low ocean wave.
In front of the hotel window that shines onto the pool that shines onto the art gallery that shines onto the Italian restaurant I've never actually visited that illuminates the Christmas tree in its spot on the lot
That shines onto the back of the truck that
illuminates the lovingly paneled wall that breathes with its peach carpet lungs towards the
Sermon of a bookstore aisle looking out on the
Political demonstration.
Except, I can't read any of the titles or signs from behind this
window.
I can’t read any of their tires from this glassed off ventricle.
The shredded gas station sign is the last pilgrim. The gas is $2.85 a gallon. I remember writing about the
hurricanes.
I wished on them.
