Some Number of Things

"Some" as opposed to "Any", which is how we hear it: "Any number of things." Or "reasons" if not "things," as in, I don't know what motivates the anti-vaxer; could be any number of reasons, though the artist known for his lapidarian ruminations has reduced the exhaustive unimaginabilty of "any" to the smoothly turned out certainty of "some," as in some (eleven) recent works that make up his current exhibition, Some Number of Things, at Catriona Jeffries Gallery.

The work atop this post is applied directly to the gallery wall and is called Always Some Number of Things (2021). In the corner to the right is the stylus used to render it, the medium as it were, which is aluminum,  a smelted metal, but in the form of a can, a beer can as opposed to a pop can, a lager as opposed to an IPA, a can of Lucky Lager, which, like Sportsman cigarettes, is a northern B.C. brand (not to be confused with Northern B.C.). Once applied to latex, the mark made is in fact a scuff, the kind we don't generally value for its arbitrariness and that, as damage, can be miraculously erased with those Mr. Clean (M. Net, en francais) Magic Erasers, a "cleaning" device so thorough it would have made a mess of Rauschenberg's unofficial collaboration with De Kooning.

So yes, you have to back up (to the north wall opposite) to begin to appreciate this work, I think. It keeps unravelling. And yes, it's okay that backing up doesn't make the text any less illegible, because it's not meant to be deciphered as (booze-bleary?) information, only tussled with, as art (a murmuration?). But it is worth the struggle, because in trying all sorts of things come to mind, some of them generative, as in, I will visit this show again. It has asked so much of me. The least I can do is provide it.