2019
Collaborating Master Print: Peter Haarz
Five-color plate lithographs on Somerset Satin White paper
17 x 20 in (each)
Published by the Brodsky Center at PAFA, Philadelphia.

The Nature of the Beast is a series of five lithographs based on five video frames extracted from a sixteen-minute-long video, Fingernails on a Blackboard: Bella.

This series was produced through a residency at the Brodsky Center and developed in dialogue with two master printers: Randy Hemminghaus and Peter Haarz. I was interested in the relationship between stillness in print and the still frame of a video. How does lithography refuse duration and how can it interrupt that which is sequential or successive? I was intrigued by what such a transliteration could do to fragments of this dialogue between a voice coach and feminist politician, Bella Abzug. In this process, I extract speech and change its meaning. The question of what or who is the beast in the exchange takes flight. The five utterances or resoundings come out of but also depart from Bella Abzug, they move to questions around political voice, the articulation of politics, the specific-gendered conundrum of speaking in and through politics.

Here text is unleashed from voice. By “unleash” I mean to give space to the words, thoughts, and ideas, to let them become material again and release them to new relationships. The tongue and the utterance; the pussycat and the beast; kitty, kitty, kitty and more. I want the words to find life, force, potency, power and ferocity again.