Britt d'Argaville, 'Landscape'.

29 Jul - 14 Aug 2023

Doesn’t everyone here hate the wind? When it changes, fixing faces, wound up and stuck inside? Such vistas of unearthly beauty and wonder are reconfigured by its bitter gusts, sowing new asterisms beneath-foot. It constitutes logical breaks and secretes modalities, like the precession of the equinoxes. The Crux vanishes from the northern sky, superseded by Ursa Major, Leo Minor — then Ionian, Locrian, Mixolydian, major fifth, flat seventh, transposed ninth, shifting disharmonies between.

Snowfall melts in needles of balsam, coalescing with the smoke which perfumes the air. Every setting of the sun crests into a familiar horizon, spewing kaleidoscopic crimson, and is replaced by a timeless night. Forced to draw punctuations, we work, then play, you win, I scream, we bicker, we fuck. We’re in a field that feels like forgetting, it’s made of ostrich feathers, but really, we’re in a bed that we call ours. I feel stupid, you say you do too, and so, in other words, we’re in heaven.

Here, I make myself horizontal. One arm wraps around the other, rolling over, twisting core, before gravity shifts, and slippages of spine decompress in relief of the strict symmetries of uprightness. Limbs outstretched, I trace their range of motion, in turn rendering an angel. The friction between my body hairs and the velvet surface of clouds generates static, sparking a storm for another time. After, I can’t sleep, the wind howls at the window. Transfixed, I watch the yellow-green of a solitary street light sneak through a gap in the blinds and jaundice the wall, framing your dozing head. The snow stops melting and accretes on my skin, its insulation resigning me to sleep.

In the beginning there was an end, folded thru itself. Walls of ice imposed from each end of time — sure, caps melt, but hell is frozen over. A broken compass points true north, as if Earth is spinning on a new axis. Re-polarisation, Christmas in July.


Text by Aden Miller