Open Forms

Had a long, utterly fascinating conversation with a colleague the other day, and now I can’t stop thinking about the forms of things. When does poetry become prose? When does a painting become a sculpture? I remember visiting Jay Defeo’s The Rose at the Whitney a few years back and being utterly mesmerized by its sheer scale.

Image source: https://whitney.org/collection/works/10075

A painting that has so many layers of paint applied over the course of SEVEN YEARS that it becomes a giant object, near-impossible to move. That it could only be moved by breaking a window only makes it more fascinating it to me: to make an object that takes up so much space that we now change the way we orient ourselves in relation to it…the utter dream. I very much look forward to staring at it again.

Read more about this wonderful work here: https://manettishremmuseum.ucdavis.edu/news/heat-of-the-rose