sketchbook

“Zak there’s so many cords in your paintings.”

“Yes there are.”

“So what do I say?”

“Well there are cords there. Actually. I mean, if you look around.”

“But is there a significance to it?”

“Things do need to get plugged in.”

“Mmmm…”

“The electrical cords that slither across and through the domestic spaces of Smith’s portraits—and, they remind us, our own lives and our own spaces—function—not unlike the frantic, elastic notational sketchwork underlying ‘Pictures Of What Happens On Each Page Of Thomas Pynchon’s Novel Gravity’s Rainbow’ or the coiled netting of shadow and tentacle animating ‘100 Girls and 100 Octopuses’ —not only as a meshwork of enclosing line but as vectors of information, inflection, and narrative.”

“Ok.”

“The size of the gallery keeps changing.”

“What do you mean, Andy?”

“Well I had Katherine measure it and it’s one size, and then she measured it again yesterday and it’s a different size. It’s eternally in flux.”

“What about the lights?”

“They appear to be in the same place north-south by east-west relative to a stable geographical midpoint beneath the floor assuming all the changes happen in all three dimensions simultaneously. But who wants to go next door and check with Nicole on that? ‘Nicole are we stealing and giving back and stealing again your floorspace’. Not me.”

“How’s Jess?”

“She isn’t worried.”

“She never is. Wait, three dimensions? So also the ceiling?”

“We’re looking into it, we have a lawyer, but yeah, it was 8 feet higher at lunch. Let me ask you: How do you deal with eternal flux?”

“As an artist, I’m comfortable with it, in both my personal circumstances and in society at large, I’m attuned to exploit the unique character of unstable identities.”

“Oh ok.”

“Like yesterday I woke up in the parking lot at Denny’s.”

“I’m worried about the wiring.”

“It’s holding up so far, right?”

“As far as I can tell.”

“Then whatever, right?”

“I guess.”