I believe that each of us is given one sentence at birth, and we spend the rest of our life trying to read that sentence and make sense of it.
Li Young Lee
Clare Stephenson, La-Belle-Toute-Savante, screenprint on wood, 108.3 × 61 inches. Courtesy of Sorcha Dallas, Glasgow.
The lines for and of Olivia run a curious parallel between T. Zachary Cotler’s poem and recent monumental silkscreen prints on wood by Clare Stephenson. This cross-current is best elucidated by an elusive presence streaming through both works … . A tenuous breeze curls through the space of Cotler’s Olivia as “the cold, nine-second ladder/in her spine,” perhaps the same chill that rustles the pages of the book, the same breeze lifting the skirts and wraps of Stephenson’s angels-cum-drag queens who teeter asymmetrically at high-heeled-heights. The decadence in both poem and print are rife with a sense of impending decay, literary and aesthetic, which prove to be too much for the characters. Olivia turns away; Stephenson’s troupe wavers flaunted and flawed. What shakes them is their connection to beauty, their reveling and revelation in it. Their responses picture an experience of beauty that attracts and repels.
– Richard J. Goldstein
Lines for Olivia
She calls the cold, nine-second ladder
in her spine amber/elektron.
In humans, a series of trivial pain
sensations, imperceptible
as separate, is
perceived as a unit of physical pleasure, whereas
trivial pleasures in series
don’t synthesize pain—this asymmetry causes her
to drop a book. She runs into
her house
with 19th century windows …
book on the courtyard stairs
with pages blowing at the speed
computers/archangels read.
Clare Stephenson is an artist based in Glasgow represented by Sorcha Dallas, Glasgow; and Linn Luhn, Cologne. She has exhibited at Talbot Rice Gallery, Edinburgh; Dicksmith, London; and Malmö, Madrid. Most recently, she was featured at the Centre for Contemporary Art, Glasgow’s The Dirty Hands group exhibition.
Richard J. Goldstein is a Brooklyn-based painter and writer.
T. Zachary Cotler’s writings appear in the US and UK, with new poems soon forthcoming in The Paris Review, The London Magazine, and Poetry.
I believe that each of us is given one sentence at birth, and we spend the rest of our life trying to read that sentence and make sense of it.
Li Young Lee