spuytenduyvil

Lori Anderson Moseman’s work, always complexly nuanced/folded/troubled, is such a pleasure to encounter. Here the serious play, playful seriousness working through and against disaster. Laughing at death?

 

I love the movement between visual and textual, the blurring of those boundaries in the materials of the puppets’ “stage,” the integration of so much thinking, reading, threading through this “staging” of argument. All the “negligible” sets set in nested stacks, their collapse an avalanche upon the “staging” of risk.

 

The puppets themselves are absurd, minimalist stand-ins for “us,” awash in seas of circumstance, choice, history, and critical mass (of those “negligible” sets), still wielding our small skills/tools (a pole, a bridge, a ladder, wit) against the monumental (and dehumanizing) forces in which we are embedded and complicit. Absurd, sweet, hapless, hope(lessly)ful of our own finitude’s resistance to erasure, rowing a boat into night on the tides of the neglected. Absurd consequence, absurdly consequential.

 

A text to sit with, look in through, to inhabit the divergent convergences of its doubled surfaces as they converse across our distance.

 

                          Marthe Reed, (em)bodied bliss