October 1 - 14, 2025
B10: Pacific Northwest College of Art
Portland, Oregon
“It's always the same story: go out in order to come back in, leave in order to arrive, begin in order to finish, and vice versa. I had gone out, left, begun, but everything else was in his power, except the points of my limbs and of my desires, which limbs and desires were at that time inert. This story has already been told, I've already lost all that, and I've already forgotten, and it's the memory of that forgetting that reassures me. I know it all in advance: the only part that eludes me is the ending. Looked at from the other side, from the outside, the ending could be taken for the beginning: this waiting has already taken up time, has already come to an end.”
Inspired by the novel, the Third Body by Hélène Cixous, I Write with the Body, “a loose narrative line with ancedotes, autobiogrphy, myth, dream, fantasy, philosophical insights, and intertextual citations of and conversations with other authors and thinkers.”
The exhibition explores permeable relationships of alternating presence and absences, seperations and rejoinings. In the text, this relationship assumes protean forms within complex webs of writing. Cixous uses the “third body” out of entwined bodies of the narrator and her lover. In this exhibiton space, waiting, which seems like a suspension, has already transformed into completion just by existing in time. Embracing desire and ambiguity, the cyclical nature of experiences is upon us, beginnings and endings are folding into each other. Juxtaposition, association, illustrative; in memory and in forgetting, blurs what is truly happening. For “She” was trapped in a loop where everything had “already happened,” except the ending, which continues to remain elusive.
Using large - format film photography, darkroom processes, and moving image, this show creates visual presence that is unspeakably in-between.
Through layered female portrature and subjectivity, I Write with the Body emerges as a physical and psychoanalytic photographic show, psychedelic in its 2D nature. Text does not explain the visual and rejects that images should be translated into words and words into literal images. Neither medium resolves the other. Instead, they create a productive disorientation, in which the viewer may confront gaps between meaning, image, and language.
The third body is what is formed when two people forge a deep relation. Like the third space or the third wave, the third body redefines what it means to be a body. The body in this context is in-between binaries, a site of language, or, at times, the body is earth... ash, taken up by the wind. It is a metaphor. And when the lover leaves, what is left? Wounds of knowing, of having had, now of longing. This is the beginning. The body soon reconstitutes itself as one, stands on two legs, learns to love again.
Moving Image: The Incantation of Gradiva
Operating as a mythopoeic reimagining, the film liberates Gradiva from the sacrificial script historically imposed upon the feminine. Drawing on the spirit of Hélène Cixous’s fascination with Wilhelm Jensen’s, Gradiva and Sigmund Freud’s psychoanalytic reading of the novella in Delusion and Dream in Jensen’s Gradiva, the moving images suspend Gradiva in non-linear time; in-between the suggestion of movement and the fixity of stone. In the novel, as Hanold projects his fantasies onto her, her image becomes detached from her own subjectivity and imagined to serve his desires. Seen through a feminist theological lens, this idealization evokes traditions that sanctify feminine self-abnegation, transforming feminine submission and emotional labor into virtues through which masculine subjectivity is restored.
“The body is a medium through which language is generated: a transmission, an inscription, and a renewal is made.” - Hélène Cixous