BARRETT WHITE
Feasts of Hunger
Giulia Cenci, June Crespo, Michael E. Smith
Spazio Orr, Brescia
1
Splayed across the wall, a trailing, twining spire of vomitous slant gnarls a metal shepherd’s staff—mutated core sample of the infected device, writhing with Tetsuo extensions that weft warm grey flesh, a spent fire pit murmuring. The warped conduit clamp bends toward waxing light, smeared with melted rubber, dusted with ash: a dowsing rod for artifacted collapse. Veined crutch and flotsam, there is an anemone movement to its filigree.
2
A sole survivor from the annihilation of humanity sits on the floor.
“...and I came all this way, crawling. Have you seen the movie Cube 2:Hypercube? There are these spinning geometric forces of light (biblically accurate angels maybe) that slice and tear people apart, almost surgically. That’s what it was like. That’s what happened to me. Somewhere along the line, passing through dimensions, I got fused with another torso, a botched human centipede. I couldn’t believe it, either. And all I got was this t-shirt. Have you seen the movie Thir13en Ghosts, starring Tony Shaloub? In the movie, a mansion is used as a giant device to summon some unruly spirits. It’s all necromancy. One of the spirits is The Torso: legless, decapitated, wrapped in plastic. It crawls along the floor and frightens the young son (played by child actor Alec Roberts) but other than that seems practically harmless. I know: I’m a delicate ceramic (prone to flaking) and mindful of my displaced chakras. An unraveled cord, the shell of a hungry ghost...anyway, how am I talking? Does this hollow voice at least sound like it was once partially full?”
3
A porcupine fish flies out of the hole in the back of your head. It pastes itself to the wall, prone and oblong, facing upward in plasticine apogee. Mary Magdalene in ecstasy. A pair of pliers dangle from its tail fin: tinker's bite to fill godlike void with malevolent machination. An unholy truck stop toe ring.
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Portal
Yein Lee
Final Hot Desert, Great Salt Lake, Utah
recalls soil to amend terraformed metamorphosis into terraces on lakes flipped back from its demand for the opening aerial vehicle replicant shatter scales the carcass of an octopus stranded at the turbidity slough and sinking in its own phosphorescence churning mounds of salt in search of fuel deposits suspensionless on seismic plates whose disruption can be seen silhouetted through the flow of lights aboard distant recovery vehicles smelting fire with nematocysts disappear amidst sister oil storms the aircraft collapsed in glassed slouched horizon strewn with nets cords of hydrocarbons neurotoxins swaying towers the relics of fiberoptics some airframe surfaces bloomed indigo brightly enough for observers to remark on the solar illumination navigational map breaking through its cloudy pneumatophore
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Barrett White edits Tagvverk. His poetry and textual experiments have appeared or are forthcoming in The Brooklyn Rail, P-Queue, Diagram, Always Crashing, baest, and elsewhere. His critical writing on art and literature can be found in places such as the Action Books Blog, Social Text, Full Stop, and FLAT. A video piece, titled "Pessimism of the Intellect, Optimism of the Will," was recently reviewed in The Paris Review Daily, and his editorial and artistic practice has been recognized by Rhizome, Printed Matter, Crisp-Ellert Museum, and the Northwest Film Forum. barrettwhite.info