Grip Slip: a response by Carole McCurdy
wood bone mill
Site-specific performance on July 13, 2019, in and around a mulberry tree between two houses
on North Hermitage Avenue, Chicago
[closing iteration of a project presented between the fall of 2017 and the summer of 2018 in each of the four seasons, perpetually reshaped by the earth’s orbit around the sun]
Bryan Saner: Creator, Performer
Matty Davis: Creator, Performer
Eryka Dellenbach: Performer
Sara Zalek: Performer
Wood Bone Mill (the book) is avaiable in Chicago via Inga: https://i-n-g-a.com/
And in the web through Printed Matter: https://www.printedmatter.org/catalog/54601/
image by Zac Whittenburg
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grip slip
and a plummet
into wood-chips and earth
a fine grind and a rough,
the cutting teeth underneath
and everywhere still working:
a Wood Bone Mill.
together you built
a house between two houses,
a house of the space embraced by
branches, visibly imaginary, a liminal house village
where myth and metaphor hang over an abyss by gritty fingertips
where
it all depends it all depends it all
depends on these dependencies.
a house made of sweat, scherenschnitte, and stumps.
[I teleport to various of Calvino’s
Invisible Cities, am hand-pumped to Tarkovsky.
The Stalker takes only men to the Zone
of fearful secret wish
while the Wife Mother holds her own
in rhetorical frustration
and the Daughter’s telekinesis is
handicap, is power of sadness,
is simple bending of light,
does not break the glass.]
But in the house you built together,
no glass—
the inverted house that holds itself apart
has women this time
who swing you into a slow hold,
who poke a hole into the bosom
of a hermitage. and out comes some
new question in tight jeans
about manhood hewn out of what:
something that’s been cut.
image by Maren Celeste
image by Mary Coyne
image by Zac Whittenburg
image by Zac Whittenburg
image by Mary Coyne
image by Zac Whittenburg
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Carole McCurdy is a Chicago-based artist whose work addresses grief and anxiety, duty and resistance, and the absurd mysteries of embodiment. With Aurora Tabar she curated Power Ouch!, a festival of body-based performances about violence, at Links Hall in February 2019. She has shown her work at the Chicago Cultural Center, Defibrillator Gallery, Epiphany Dance, Hamlin Park, High Concept Laboratories, Links Hall, and No Nation, among others. She received a 2016 Lab Artist award from the Chicago Dancemakers Forum and was a Fall 2016 Sponsored Artist at High Concept Laboratories. She created and directed an ensemble piece, Waver (2017), with support from CDF, HCL, and 3Arts Chicago. carolemccurdy.com