Washing my face before bed, mother’s day 2018
Jill Khoury
i scan my face in the mirror
like every night / today it’s puffy / pasty / pastry
my chin slides down my face
my neck is layers of filo
there are
crisps and pocks
in my porcelain
my eyes are blue
which make them unlike my mother’s
and asymmetrical
which make them unlike my father’s
my hair is thick glossy bright red
i have lush ashbrown eyebrows
and a jagged
hairline
it has been five years and eight
months since my mother’s suicide
i cry on the toilet
i want her back
but not her // more like an ideal her
open
with her loving
this is going nowhere
i wash my face
there is no point in feeding
this ache with more thrashes
with a clean face and brushed hair
i am slightly
more pretty
like every night / today it’s puffy / pasty / pastry
my chin slides down my face
my neck is layers of filo
there are
crisps and pocks
in my porcelain
my eyes are blue
which make them unlike my mother’s
and asymmetrical
which make them unlike my father’s
my hair is thick glossy bright red
i have lush ashbrown eyebrows
and a jagged
hairline
it has been five years and eight
months since my mother’s suicide
i cry on the toilet
i want her back
but not her // more like an ideal her
open
with her loving
this is going nowhere
i wash my face
there is no point in feeding
this ache with more thrashes
with a clean face and brushed hair
i am slightly
more pretty
Jill Khoury is interested in the intersection of poetry, gender, and disability. She edits Rogue Agent, a journal of embodied poetry and art, and has two chapbooks--Borrowed Bodies (Pudding House, 2009) and Chance Operations (Paper Nautilus, 2016) and a full-length collection, Suites for the Modern Dancer (Sundress Publications, 2016). Find her at jillkhoury.com.
The Art
UNTITLED (FOTOGRAF STUDYOSU ISKENDERUN), 40"X30", 2016
Daisy Patton has a BFA in Studio Arts from the University of Oklahoma with minors in History and Art History and an Honors degree. Her MFA is from The School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston/Tufts University, a multi-disciplinary program. Patton's practice is focused on history, memory, and social commentary stemming from this youth soaked in such specific cultural landscapes. Her work explores the meaning and social conventions of families, little discussed or hidden histories, and what it is to be a person living in our contemporary world. One such series is Forgetting is so long, reviewed in Hyperallergic and The Denver Post, as well as featured in Create! Magazine, The Jealous Curator, Vasari21, Fraction Magazine, Full Blede, and Backroom Caracas. Patton is the recipient of the Montague Travel Grant for research in Dresden, Germany, and she was also awarded a position as an exchange student at the University of Hertfordshire, UK while an undergraduate. She has completed artist residencies at Minerva Projects, Anderson Ranch, the Studios at MASS MoCA, RedLine Denver, and Eastside International in Los Angeles. She has exhibited in solo and group shows nationally, including her first museum solo at the CU Art Museum at the University of Colorado. K Contemporary represents Patton in Denver. More here
About the art: “Defacement is the confrontation with death and dislocation…”—Michael Taussig, Defacement. “ They say we die two deaths: the first is our actual passing; the second is when the last person who remembers us takes their final breath. Family photographs, vessels of memory, are integral to extending this quasi-life. They show a mother, a child, a past self, full of in-jokes and the mundane meaningful only to a select few. But divorced from their origins, these emotion-ridden images become unknowable and lost in translation, for they are intrinsically entwined with the intimate memories of someone. These images are timeless because photography can forever capture a moment—so much so that they have outlived their families and purpose, becoming orphans. As we drown in an overwhelming visual culture, what place does an old family photo have outside their original home? In Forgetting is so long, [the series which this painting is from] I collect abandoned, anonymous family photographs, enlarge them past their familiar size, and paint over them. I paint to disrupt, to reimagine, to re-enliven these individuals until I can either no longer recognize them or their presence is too piercing to continue. Family photographs are sacred relics to their loved ones, but unmoored the images become hauntingly absent. Anthropologist Michael Taussig states that defacing these types of objects forces a “shock into being;” suddenly we perceive them as present, revered, and piercing. By mixing painting with photography, I lengthen Roland Barthes’ “moment of death” (the photograph) into some semblance of purgatory. Not alive but not quite dead, each person’s newly imagined and altered portrait straddles the lines between memory, identity, and death. They are monuments to the forgotten. All works in this series are mixed media paintings (oil-painted photo prints), mounted on panel. A note on titling: all the paintings are technically untitled, but if there is any written information on the found photograph, that is included in parentheses. Otherwise, the bracketed wording is a general description.”
About the art: “Defacement is the confrontation with death and dislocation…”—Michael Taussig, Defacement. “ They say we die two deaths: the first is our actual passing; the second is when the last person who remembers us takes their final breath. Family photographs, vessels of memory, are integral to extending this quasi-life. They show a mother, a child, a past self, full of in-jokes and the mundane meaningful only to a select few. But divorced from their origins, these emotion-ridden images become unknowable and lost in translation, for they are intrinsically entwined with the intimate memories of someone. These images are timeless because photography can forever capture a moment—so much so that they have outlived their families and purpose, becoming orphans. As we drown in an overwhelming visual culture, what place does an old family photo have outside their original home? In Forgetting is so long, [the series which this painting is from] I collect abandoned, anonymous family photographs, enlarge them past their familiar size, and paint over them. I paint to disrupt, to reimagine, to re-enliven these individuals until I can either no longer recognize them or their presence is too piercing to continue. Family photographs are sacred relics to their loved ones, but unmoored the images become hauntingly absent. Anthropologist Michael Taussig states that defacing these types of objects forces a “shock into being;” suddenly we perceive them as present, revered, and piercing. By mixing painting with photography, I lengthen Roland Barthes’ “moment of death” (the photograph) into some semblance of purgatory. Not alive but not quite dead, each person’s newly imagined and altered portrait straddles the lines between memory, identity, and death. They are monuments to the forgotten. All works in this series are mixed media paintings (oil-painted photo prints), mounted on panel. A note on titling: all the paintings are technically untitled, but if there is any written information on the found photograph, that is included in parentheses. Otherwise, the bracketed wording is a general description.”
