On November 7th, 2025, SAIC's Undergraduate Exhibition opened, in which I am a participant of. I recall imagining what sort of work I would make for it. I used to run off of a vision I saw in a previous SAIC show, which I now realize was mostly likely a Graduate exhibition, of a large, wide, long roll of paper beautifully running along some sort of contraption-like structure. It was a print, perhaps. Or at least could look like one. Or maybe I imagined mine being a print. I originally fantasized over this when I used to make ink paintings and pretend to be an abstract expressionist: black and white on paper, large, taking over. I fantasized about it again when I made a lithograph from one of our larger stones, printed on folded paper, chine-collé'd to itself: black and white on paper, large, taking over. I thought I had struck a new turn to follow on my 'art making practice,' one that visually expressed who I thought I was at the time, who I thought I was expressing at the time. I had my first non-positive, ambivalent critique over the print: "it wasn't large enough."
I went into the gallery on the 7th to take some iPhone photos of my work.
On November 8th, 2025, SAIC's Undergraduate Exhibition had its opening reception, which I went to. I figured it would be a lot of standing awkwardly and glancing around, recognizing faces that never quite form certainly in my memory, and not doing anything about this half-recognition. I recently had gone to my parent's house to bring my bicycle over after a decently hefty iMessage debate over whether or not I should be allowed to bring the bicycle over. I had felt myself form solidly once again in the cool November air that was approaching, and my all black-and-white Canondale gifted bicycle looked at me as a being somewhere between an extension of myself and a pet. I left with my backpack full, containing my Macbook, a spool of thick black thread, and any all-black gothic ouji lolita clothing I happened to own. It was encapsulated on the 4 mile bike ride to the commuter rail station, in which I rushed due to underestimating the effect of suburban infrastructure and a minor uphill course: I was my bike and I also was on my bike, and as much as I wanted to stop rushing, it made no difference if I did, because once I'd stop rushing, my bike would stop, and so I'd stop. I was threatened by something of an external force, but I was also able to recognize and identify my own self and the very extent into how far I exist. I needed those costume-like clothes as suits of armour.
When I came back from the gallery on the 7th, I spotted a black cat by the church and played with it until I realized it could be lost. I took a photo of its collar that had 2 phone numbers attached to it, a 773, and an area code I didn't recognize. I thought about calling it but got too nervous, but then I got nervous about getting nervous about not doing anything regarding the cat. So I texted them when I got home, and it seems that the cat had just escaped and the two owners lived nearby. I was thanked and that was that. I existed as an 847, how strange.
During the reception, everyone was holding flower bouquets and placing down flower bouquets, and I was very confused by this sight until I recalled watching my Godmother who isn't actually my Godmother's youngest daughter act in her high school play, and how at the end, everyone would deliver flower bouquets to the actors. I didn't think much of it, because to be a stage actor had this traditional 'fuck you it's old but it's real' revolutionary aspect to it, and I figured flowers were old and revolutionary or something, at least outside of Valentine's day when the bouquet's at the grocery store would dwindle in stock.
I walked around with my hands in my pockets looking at the work, focusing on ones I hadn't focused on prior. I was constantly moving back and forth, two-stepping out of the way for people to walk past, or walking around people who decided to be more stationary. There was a moment where I about to walk through a people-hole opening, almost in a queue of gallery-lookers, when someone from a less relevant angle stepped forward and looked at me with a face slightly crinkled, a face I recognize. Actually, this happened multiple times. I don't recall a single time I nodded with a silent smile or motioned with my hand like one does when letting those older than you board the train first, or like one does when those older than you let you board the train first. It happens in the art museum cafe I frequent by the power of a family membership. Never more am I so misaligned with someone's thought process, yet so grossly attached to the societal operations of a scene. No one is like-minded, at least between me and the other members. I cannot describe what happens in a way that properly ropes in its own context, but I can make an analogy: that morning, on the 8th, the L train passengers had formed an interior queue to exit upon approaching a station, myself included, as always, when a lady around my mother's age with a large luggage suitcase grabbed my arm almost intimately. She squeezed it and leaned forward into me. Although this could have been because of the train's movement, the extent of her movement seemed unnecessary. She looked at me in the face, face crinkled, and excused herself, and in the clear disparage between our thought processes, she declared that she was getting off at this station, alluding to an annoyance over me blocking her way. The train was stopping now and all I wanted to do was just face forward again to prepare for a 0 millisecond reaction of my feet taking a step forward and exiting. I told her that I too was exiting, but her disposition didn't change much.
I walked around swiftly and felt very short compared to the gallery walls and attendees. I wondered what it would feel like sensation-wise to see my work after walking through and familiarizing myself with the images of everyone else's stranger-work. I lowered my expectations and expected a similar operation to waking up and viewing a painting you had worked on at night, wondering why it seemed so fresh, why the tides you once swam in have now shifted into a picture of a beach. When I turned the corner to walk into my work, nothing happened.
I was dressed in one of the shirts I had taken from the house, ordinary slacks, and my black trench coat with leather gloves in its pockets which I had thought I lost but instead found them the morning of. Its pockets were perfectly positioned for putting your hands inside of. My visual memory was of my coat, as well as flashing instances of students' parents whom I had just finished describing as 'formal; like they raised their children on a diet of nuts and tofu; but work as lawyers.' There was a lot of celebratory moaning and joke-making all said in a finalizing tone. I suppose it was a tone of graduation, although plenty of them were not graduating this semester, myself included, and it was still only November.
I just now attempted to remember what a graduating tone felt like. I can force out a picture of me leaving my high school graduation in a hurry so that my parents and I were not stuck in the traffic of SUV's maneuvering out of the parking lot. But nothing in this memory scene is significant enough to repeat, I don't even want to share that this scene was something I had repeated in a hand-me-down fashion. I witnessed my own scene 3 years prior, watching my brother do the same. What I had actually recalled was a scene from my middle school graduation, as our class walked out from one area to the next, from the ceremony to some classroom-like space akin to an after party. Held in one of the high school's one-of-many gymnasiums, I recall the bright orange wooden floors and blue walls of its corridor, I recall walking down in a queue and I recall recalling the times I queued up as an elementary school student, and how my last name always placed me alphabetically in the 4th position, which I considered to be an ugly number compared to something like the beautiful, red colored '5'. Overtime, I started to understand the number as an extension of myself. As we turned one corner, the queue bunched up and stopped, and I recall the blue walls very vividly here, because a group of my classmates were in the corner crying with each other. I was confused why it was happening, and the circle of hugging students had expressed that these were joyful tears. That didn't help. I gazed out with a fuzzy vision at familiar faces doing unfamiliar things. I had taken what was left in a bottle of Tylenol, and I was thinking about a student I never knew who had a seizure during a school dance.
I'm not sure what I expected when I kept circling around my work, peeking at it while trying to hide the fact that I was peeking. Consciously, I went to peek to see if my book was okay, if it wasn't slanted or fallen over, but this quickly turned into a neurotic need to see if others were looking at my work. Each time I peeked, a large group would be socializing in the section so that no one had space to see the work on the walls. I walked past for a final time with intent to leave and saw someone taking photos of my work, and then saw a member of the large group step backwards and bump into her, in which she huddled into herself and briskly exited the scene.
That morning, on the 8th, when I started to participate in the operation of the train queue, someone sitting down who had been looking at me prior looked at me again. I recognized the look, located somewhere in the quivering of the eyes and the shaky, slow movements of the body. He motioned a tapping motion and I took out my earbud and bent down to hear him. I looked raw as fuck.
