💥✍ The sitter sits. Gloves of patent black & shiny, shorn of personality like prosthesis, is first; lumberjack shirt, skater garb in the light of day 𝘵𝘶𝘳𝘯𝘦𝘥 "that-type-of-thing-doesn't-happen-round-here" chic in the basement fluorescence, is second. Next the planed timber, clean & pale as scrubbed bone, bolted at the knee, rests on a workbench, slightly lifting its hamstring, waiting for the rubber hammer to pop the knee jerk. Deep in the Chardin shadow of the foreground, gumtaped MDF cuts one diagonal, the workbench another, the timber another. The sitter's body, slack, hides beneath this architecture of strong-armed angles & lines with hands as inhuman as Pinocchio's nose but somehow telling the dark truth. One glove & arm separated from the body, a phantom limb playing dead; the other caresses the hip of the sitter (& knuckles the rim of my phone) without feeling, just vogue. Without the fetish of the glove, a substitute for something other & amplifier for 𝘵𝘩𝘢𝘵 something other, the image is as quiet as a Chardin without the splayed fish & pampering paws of the killer cat, the black jug or prim & anaemic schoolmistress. Gloves here are the Law, the order, the eyes. In a time of limbs & organs & masks & whips, when gloves register before faces, turned away, this image from yesteryear circa 2006, when things were good & bad before they got worse circa 2008, when 𝘖𝘭𝘥 𝘋𝘳𝘪𝘷𝘦𝘴 Died 𝘏𝘢𝘳𝘥, says something about now, holding time with numbed senses that awkwardly, like a black beetle on its crunchy back, articulates its quandary by rolling back & forth on the hunch of it exo, waiting, watching through the pincer sockets of its gripping gaze. 📷 @helmsbrink/Instagram

APRIL 16, 2020 (ORIGINALLY POSTED ON INSTAGRAM @a_flash_in_the_small_night