I struggled for weeks to put words to this exhibition.

There is a false sense of fixity to language that seems to subvert the body and the long concatenation of other-bodies that precedes it. When I first looked through the documents cataloguing the work shown here, when I first watched the films and studied the photographs and read the various statements that accompanied them, I was confronted by a tangle of warbled fabric, photosensitive dye, swirling pixels, and — most significantly — carnal excreta that utterly thwarted any attempt on my part to address it by name.

Perhaps this is due in part to the highly durational nature of the work that Kenzie Ellis is showcasing here. Far beyond being the culmination of years spent in academia, there are unknown generations of ancestors seeping into the space. The effluvium of countless faces crushed under the weight of progress has trickled into this room and facilitated the growth of something fungal or bacterial; something that smells strange and new and disturbing and moist. There is a pervasive sense of something fecundating under the surface of the work on display here.

They say that you cannot step into the same river twice. If there is a genius loci to some stretch of self-reformed riverbank at the border between Ellis’ flesh and blood, it resides here. Their work is freshly hauled out of the silt of several incarnations.

There is a false sense of fixity to language, and it is false because nothing we hear is uttered outside of time. You cannot listen to your name being repeated, as there is no real repetition, only similitude. But there is, of course, a thing being named. This thing is eternal. It is in reference to this eternal thing that language puts on the airs of fixity. This is not really so different from the body as it derives itself from a tangle of cells and degenerates swiftly into a carcass. Ellis extends to the body the same fractured grace I extend to language. The frail gestures of the flesh in the direction of the mind are made sacrosanct in their motion and fluidity. They are never perfect, being constantly caught up in the web of becoming perfect. They slough and leak and bloat and fissure and drip and pucker, and they will never reach their fullness. But from the fullness, Ellis extends a hand down into the crust and ooze and the grime.

This room is witness to a sacramental handshake. Everything here is making itself. It attempting to save itself from nature and time. And its ascent is preserved in every wall and floor.

-Adele Johnston,

Editor in Chief, Jeopardy Magazine