Arist Statement for "Spool"
(Senior thesis, Hampshire College)


      I pulled at a small scab on my lip when, without warning, it grew, and I drew it out of me like a long sash, pulling and pulling it out of me and into the air. It grew so long it surrounded the sky, carving outlines in the clouds, like a long umbilical cord.

      Words here are thought but not uttered. There is something at the deepest core that is kept private, concealed, yet it yearns to reach every corner of the earth. This project lives in a space of quiet chaos. It is both the healing and the wound. Removed from the present, my subjects are the muses for a chimerical world.
      This series, broken into chapters, beckons the viewer into a cyclical, spool-like narrative: unheard words, like ectoplasm, spiral out of the mouth and towards the sky. Ghostly figures merge flesh and earth. Natural light becomes sinister in its fervent piercing. The presence of the father becomes vulnerable, haunted by the willful gaze of the other.
      Through saturation of color the viewer is brought, jarringly, into the present. The longing for another world is still apparent, yet these images confront the real, the evident, the existing. Like an endless coil that is constantly weaving in and out and back again, this series urges the viewer to recall the unknown, the nameless.
      Hovering between the real and imaginary, "Spool" intertwines backyards, bodies, sheets and hair, which all form parts of a larger whole: a silent collection of moments with no beginning or end---some airy and incomplete, others painful in their realization. These images come alive in what is not found, what is not explained but rather felt, like a sudden loss of breath or a fleeting recollection of a troubling dream.


      -Ariel Rosenbloom
      April 2009