Review

March 15, 2019, 4:37pm

Personal Stars: Maia Cruz Palileo at Monique Meloche Gallery

She has finally come, born across centuries and oceans and the yawning gaps of the pied world hewn for us and by us from the flesh and bone of the Earth, across the ragged expanse—flesh hanging like foliage, necrotic, mycological and un-healing as the hearts of men (men especially, here, not “men” as the priapic stand-in for all humankind, which is a fucked up way to think and really truly indicative of the kind of men we are being dealt with here, men who happen upon a glorious verdant chain drawn across the vicious expanse which hides in it the horrors of our world, the planet's calid sacred heart, the shifting red, the immolating ring born on the Jovian finger of the true ruler who we have betrayed, just like we're betraying each other, or more specifically in this case these men are betraying each other), the men whose claret-caked hands have driven the bayonet, twist the aperture far beyond the fibrin, wipe clean the entrails and drive forward again—and she has freed, has excised, has extricated the men's targets, with a deific scalpel, debridement as deliverance, from the burdens of white men, from the alien words which fall hard, knocking teeth over like tombstones—cultural vandalism!, vandalism-cum-conquest, petty and political, in the sense of all structures being re-sorted, the scaffold a literal skeleton—as they drop like a bird kill; has cut them free of the white cloth which is the funeral veil of their own humanity, the very backdrop to the cruel slavery of scare quote science before which they pose dead on and in profile, the twin portraits of prisoners and objects, and placed them instead in the tabula rasa of a sympathetic and empathetic framer …