Sam Ran Over Sand or Sand Ran Over Sam:

RETHINKING CHARACTER

Materials and form have character and or give rise to character. This text aims to give voice to how and what might be a character in this work and what parts might be played by the various actors. The action takes place as the senses of the body meet the constructs of the mind.
— Jessica Stockholder

THE CAST OF CHARACTERS:

Three shadows wait to be. They wait for Sam to stand on three different occasions just there, in the future, out of sand. Three figures eclipsed; lost to the lights and slipped between the pages — the covers of a bed. They act — standing still on the stage. The event moves down the path, Life’s middle road, the yellow brick road; mark-making as they go, teetering between artifice and good will.

Those three bend down, whispering to the lake flowing underground — their noses pressed to the floor — pressed some more — the nostrils squeezed tight so nothing can ooze. Backs bend, awkwardly. No robes flowing — no fabrics blowing in the wind. It is quiet.

The pots and pans clatter in the background. The ongoing nature of daily life in this case is sidelined. The stopped hush of snow falling is centered in the gallery. Projections — pictures — in the mind’s eye and in the eye are patched together onto the wall and felt through a tunnel and in an empty space. They are in the middle of a page. The wind blows the leaves around their feet. Purple slime slips over their backs. Their noses are runny.

That eccentric branch at the door!Unsettled in isolation beckoning to the intruder with warm and enthusiastic invitation. So in love! Some wind slipping through the door and the energy and envy of the air moving is also a protagonist in the midst of the still staged artifice. The plateau of colors is still and yet more gushing, twisted and upsettingly alive than the plants at the door were last year. Here is a big heap of static event piled up like shards of broken plastic buckets.

The icebox is full of love metered out over time. Metering is a kind of control. Control is necessary to living, in concert with passion, breaking the bounds of predictability and ordered knowing. The cold of winter slows life processes. The cold of the icebox mimics winter. The cold of the gallery/white cube, like the icebox, is full of love and control.

Building — the verb and the noun — in all of its life process is a character in the event here orchestrated. The stuff — carpet, stone, hardware, wood, couch, freezer, lamps, cloths, shoes, and sheetrock — is in process as is the food cycling through our tubes — making passage.

Slow dancingmingles with the tinsel, the flashing lights of Christmas, the dance floor, and the cars on the highway at night passing through downtown. The dirt under the building is alive with worms, beetles, and mold. Being kept safe, but the surfaces are too clean and the walls have too much flex in them.
Plastic is so beautiful and so frightening.
The shiny thinness of experience.
Making holes in the veneer of the hard clear surface.

The line between two colors charged! It’s impossible to separate one from the other, impossible to take that impossible place away and put it somewhere else. Try to put feet there. Dive into that place that is not there and point. Finger stretched out long and pointing like . . . and to the beach shore — the inter-tidal zone.

Carpet always stampes his feet — hard like there is mud on them. He doesn’t like sand between his toes. She brushes her hair often. And she worries about the color fading.

Green waterproof drywall rigidly embarks on a sea journey of mammoth proportions. The green sea seems to go on forever in all directions until you step back and see the edges. The size of experience changes so drastically! He is a little dry but then she likes to swim.

Wires with electricity mess up together with the air and dust specks and balls carried on breezes through colored air.

Colored air is thick and interrupted by body parts, bone, flesh, and blood flowing along channels. Channels, like the eye’s point of view, flow through space and come into focus at the end, on the wall. Projected pictures overlay the rough and tumble of the current in all directions.

The Characters are orchestrated for the eye — riding on wheels — legs flapping in the wind. The eye screeches — along in the grooves laid out for it. like a train on its track. Meanwhile, experience and oceans of color inform the action, figures, belly, dancing, and knitting.

Back to the wall, body and wall are screen; eyes painstakingly turned around character plots of stuff. The light tunnels weave together two kinds of mapping that lie side by side: the darting map the eye manufactures and the map of being as the body learns it.

The plot thickens.