“I know there’s not always blood, it’s just that each time I hear this, that’s what I see, a knife coming down” de Marc-Olivier Hamelin.

After the Lilies Died in the Cold Sun

Do you love me more when I wait at the beginning for you, like a page header desperate to reveal authorship, or pleading to feel recognizable?➀  A coffee cup is a photograph if you really think about it.➁

It was cold out, and I was sitting by a window in a bright room, watching lilies die and listening to him, in French, on an old television, talking about the bed as a place of

healing    // death
intimacy // loneliness    

“I know there’s not always blood, it’s just that each time I hear this, that’s what I see, a knife coming down”➂ is a container holding vessels of sweat, blood, piss, and other memories that leave stains. So too are photographs containers for hope, futurity, and spectres, like a Roland Barthes fever dream. These containers are infilled with a hauntological anti-presence: absence is the only decipherable hint of presence precisely through the markers that signify that something must have already been in order to first become missing. The anti-presence steeped in this exhibition suggests that the absence of the person(s) whose things we are seeing is the very force that attaches meaning to them, and the haunting remnant traces prompt us to feel something or someone that is not actually present – a ghost. “I’ve been reading texts about dead people for three years. I think I need to go to the beach now, even though those texts hold stories about beaches,” he confesses to me.

[…]
—  Alexander Rondeau

➀ Or do you love me best when I’m a lost footnote somewhere in the annals of vigils?
➁ The bitter taste of emulsion and the agitation of looking down the barrel of a lens.
➂ Bartlett, N. (1991). Ready to catch him should he fall. Serpent’s Tail, p. 238.