ARTIST DAVE SLODKI

Frankly, I just call them the dots. And while they are all untitled, each series has sort of a nominal or informal title to me, depending on what’s being explored in the writing. And that’s also sort of the explanation of the process. All of them begin with something that’s been on my mind regarding text, language, narrative, and context. The first series was about meaninglessness in writing, how one finds passages in almost anything that when isolated from context are both eminently readable and yet utterly devoid of any information. The second series is about the fallibility of memory especially regarding read narratives, how what we remember of a story eventually starts to diverge from what a piece actually is. (Not dissimilar to the way a character one is, writing will often up and do something totally different than what a writer intends.) The third series, Delectation, is sort of a high wire act, the first long form piece I’ve handwritten that continues from sheet to sheet. It’s about 20,000 words-something like fifty pages transcribed to type and was written to the page. First, none of it was written beforehand. As you can imagine from the title, which came first, I originally imagined it to be very erotic and to use the circles to cover up large parts of the text as a tease for the reader/viewer. However, exactly as I mentioned above when writing fiction the characters, if they’re real enough, have their own ideas about what they’re up to and it very quickly became a coda to a novel I wrote twenty some years ago. These characters apparently had to come back around and give an update. So now what’s underneath the circles is heartbreak and loss and grief and the difficulty of true connection as people age instead of down and dirty smut.