the desert is no lady (2023)
single channel display, screenshots of web-based email interface, stylized error poetics, photography
libby leshgold gallery at emily carr
Presented as an email draft, the work rearranges the familiar architecture of digital communication. Short textual fragments appear as recipients rather than message, while an image occupies the body of the email. Together they suggest a correspondence whose destination remains unresolved.
By shifting language into places where it does not conventionally belong, the work treats the interface as both medium and subject. It asks how memory, intimacy, and absence are organized within systems built to transmit information, and what remains when an act of communication is defined more by its trajectory than its arrival.
The work is also bound to the conditions of the software that made it possible. Changes to Gmail's interface have rendered this particular arrangement impossible to reproduce, while the screenshots that document it have themselves degraded through repeated capture and compression. The work survives as a record of an interface that no longer exists, its documentation carrying the same instability as the correspondence it depicts.
Message One (feet in sand):
"Our teeth turn to stone" / "a granite older than the world" / "harder than earth" / "Frail spittle" / "curses fall" / "black mouth" / "black mass" / "40 different colors of bruise"
Message Two (desert sunburst):
"I believed in every single contour of her perfect mind" / "Each punk rock articulation" / "her body as ornament of grace" / "Having found the giving dark" / "we became children" / "once more" / "became free" / "We never wasted a single good groan of the mattress" / "breathe rising &" / "falling like swings" / "like a hard sun" / "every wanted intention realized"
Message Three (candle wax, moths):
"I read that fate is the sum total of persistent stupidity" / "The surest way to be wrong is to think you control it" / "fate caught us" / "I tongue the dust in my mouth and feed it love" / "this is how I triumph" / "So" / "what was it like? Such teeth" / "my dears" / "you have never seen such teeth."