Column 2, Row 5

Response by Veronica Cianfrano

This is a free-write:

I put your drawing in my studio in a little cubby within a bookshelf to keep it safe from my messy art practice. It was a protected piece of an idea. It sat next to a pair of monster hands I made out of old bed sheets and fake press-on nails that women at the grocery store wear. If monsters could be nice, these would be the hands of a nice monster. On the other side of the drawing sat this weird old music box with a carousel horse on it. I took the music box component out of it years ago to try and figure out how it works. The carousel horse reminds me of my estranged father for some reason so I keep it even though I don't particularly like the idea of keeping it or even the way it looks. I can't seem to bring my self to throw it away though.

Below the drawing is a stack of books (mostly about memory, art history, and neuroscience for dummies). There's a table next to these shelves where drawings are made and stored and it's where I plop my keys down when I enter the house. On the wall, there is a huge collage of taped taped together post cards from friends and family, shows that I've been to, shows that I've had, and other things like those cards you get at funerals and those save the date cards for weddings. I forget who said the house represents levels of consciousness (freud?) but if the basement is the subconscious because you never go down there and it's where you store stuff you don't often look at, then my studio is my active consciousness, it's where my immediate recall is located. It's the wallet of my brain. All the essentials are there. Fragments of the me I think I am and the me I think I want to project. Usually these are the same.

So you're drawing has been in this context. Presented to me as is a carefully mounted segment of a whole. Like those dried out butterflies that are pinned to a black back ground for study and admiration of their beauty. Whenever I see a cloaked figure with delicate hands laid in such a pious way I think of all the images of saints I saw in church as a kid. People who were just people until one day they were tortured or murdered or something horrible happened to them and then they become a saint. Then people get to pray to you for the particular thing you're good at. This makes no sense to me. Why is St. Christopher going to protect you over some other guy/gal? Anyway, these are parts to the whole. This idea of heaven was sort of sold to me as a perfect city where everyone wants to live, with an infallible government and these saints are like the senators or mayors of particular sections of this golden city. I guess they probably get to recruit you if they like you. I'm a little rusty.

The drawing shows hands and a tool of some kind. It's mounted on black in such a way that it feels scientific. You are meant to analyze this image. But I didn't analyze it. I lived with it. It became a part of my life. It's the one work of art not made by me in this room. This is what draws attention to it and it's what caught the corner of my eye every time. Periphery-"My hands didn't make those lines" Double take- " oh right that's Dena's drawing". Repeat daily. It's a calm image but the object charged with some anxiety. i guess because it's been separated from its home in such a severe way. Religion is believing in things you can't see but they use imagery to sell it to you because seeing is believing. We trust our eyes to tell us what reality is. But I think we need all of it. I feel like I need to be around all of my things physically because it helps navigate my world and my thoughts somehow.

There are many unseeable and unknowable things in this world that make this a confusing and enlightening existence. It's not my job to "know" what is and is not or how things are or are not. It's my job to notice things visual or otherwise, filter them though my one and only filter and present them in a way that only I know how. Then I present these findings and regurgitations to the world or whoever wants to look. This is my job. Pick up the pieces, re-assemble, display, repeat. like a dung beetle or something. This is kind of all I understand.