AO ROBERTS
EMISSARIES, 2022-24
Install at In Orbit,
Anderson Ranch, 2022
MUCILAGINOUS (IRISH MOSS)
Calcium carbonate, perlite, mica, fire-glass, pigment, acrylic, spruce, sound.
Welcome. Please, sit, take this tea. We made it with herbs chosen just for you.
To your left a plate of small delicacies and sweets.
Take your time. We have cleared the space.
When you are ready, please put on these garments.
Take deep breaths. Count to six. Now repeat. Yes. Relax.
[humming a non identifiable tune, slowly]
We sing your song now. You float on your back. A barely perceptible plasma spreads itself across your skin. It is cool and clear like aloe. Now, behind closed eyes, you see a colour wheel.
Work your way around the colours, from red to orange, now indigo, violet. You land on colours that pull you in, and with each slight shift of tone and hue, you recall associated states. You hover on teal blue, feeling deep satisfaction, the fullness after food and drink in the company of dear friends. Yellow-orange, electric excitement, your addled nervous system navigating a crowd, now dull puce, flat dread and the plodding throb of a tension headache, lime green, coral pink,periwinkle blue.
Emerald tendrils descend from the ceiling to envelop you.
Your body lifts like a curtain. Water runs close by. Open your eyes.
[exultantly] You are no longer known by your vitals. All your data and diagrams have been erased.
TROPHORESTORATIVE (SKULLCAP)
Ceramic, polyester, dye, acrylic paint, steel, sound
NERVINE (VERBENA)
Ceramic, acrylic, sound.
Here we are. Try to stay in your body, the story is just at your fingers.
Can you pick it up and bring it to your lips?
Embrace the shapes of the letters and hold them in your mouth.
You might feel vertigo, a racing heart-rate. That’s ok!
Sometimes can feel calcified on the spot!
You glimpse yourself in the mirror and turn to sand. An ant hill. Stay there!
Travel your nodes and cavities.
You can be inside a waterfall, bludgeoned by water and white noise!
Or at the bottom of a bouncy ball house, under waves of children!
Or you’re trying to leave busy subway station, annoyed by commuters clipping your shoulders.
You are an exoskeleton of nerves in the electric unknown, I see you!
Standing headless in the bathtub, a leather belt in your jaws, wooden spoon in one hand, the jittering world spins in the palm of the other!
A speaking machine, reincarnated , a plastinated nervous systems.
A darling of the courts, you model dimension to diagrams!
You are a fully scalable schematic overlay!
Remember - before - it was always prisoners, dispossessed and purchased.
But we don’t worry about that now!
No begging for Skullcap or Xanax to reverse your skeins of fire!
We are done with fleshy cavities full of bones.