The PLAN is pleased to announce the opening of “A Hair Never Dissolves”, a two person exhibition by Danny Floyd and Jeff Prokash.

Through the site-specific installation of three-dimensional text and large-scale photography, Danny and Jeff both create work that is centered around the written word. Their art reflects on our poetic relationships with language and with words as living objects.

From the Exhibition Statement:

The World
hath not
known her, but
I have known
her, was the
sweet Boast
of Jesus –
The small Heart
cannot break –
The Ecstasy of
it’s penalty
solaces the
large –
Emerging from
an Abyss, and
reentering it ‘
that is Life,
is it not,
Dear?
The tie between
us is very
fine, but a
Hair never
dissolves.
Lovingly ‘
Emily `

– Emily Dickinson to Susan Huntington Gilbert Dickinson

“I sometimes try in vain to describe how the mystery of poetic text feels something like being
surrounded as if by a wilderness or an atmosphere. The bourgeois order of text-giving-meaning
offers singularities as opposed to a continuous quality. Language is strained under being
one-thing-at-a-time. I am curious to see how close language can get to continuousness – as
continuous as our lived experience. I suspect that it requires some degree of misunderstanding,
not-understanding, or confusion. Doubt, losing-track. Nonsense, defiance of authority.

The stranger is thus being discussed here, not in the sense often touched upon in the
past, as the wanderer who comes today and goes tomorrow, but rather as the person
who comes today and stays to morrow.
[…]

The unity of nearness and remoteness involved in every human relation is organized, in
the phenomenon of the stranger, in a way which may be most briefly formulated by
saying that in the relationship to him, distance means that he, who is close by, is far, and
strangeness means that he, who also is far, is actually near.”

– Georg Simmel, “The Stranger”

I record the surface of thirteen stately beeches in Warren Woods State Park: 311 acres
of primeval beech–maple forest, preserved by the Featherbone fortune of Edward Kirk Warren
in Three Oaks, Michigan. I scan the scrolled barks, stray letters, initials, the sentiments of
romantic vandals and loners, wordless scratchings: Arborglyphs.
In past mornings, on cool or sunny afternoons, in decades past, in a forest a small
interval younger, the blade belly of a Buck 110 inscribed the letters R o d. A shard of glass pared
away grey rhytidome to reveal orange cork cambium: JT heart’s MP ‘93. Bill 1969 is incised with
the blunt edge of a flathead screwdriver. Periderm split with intent; cambium and phloem fibers,
vascular membranes, severed. In time, these incisions evolve. Parenchyma cells rekindle
meristematic ambitions. The vertical syntax of xylem cells, strands, conduits, negotiate an
absence. Tannins darken the margins; time becomes tissue: Woundwood.

Official Website

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Tags: A Hair Never Dissolves, Chicago, Danny FLOYD, Humboldt Park, Jeff Prokash, the PLAN