GUEST LECTURE Eve Fowler

31st July 2015, 6:38 pm

Eve Fowler’s exhibition at Mier Gallery The Difference is Spreading, reflects an intense, five-year-long engagement with the words of Gertrude Stein. For Fowler, this engagement is at once syntactical, visual, haptic, lingual—each form of perception sliding over and upon each other, privileging none. Her work with the texts remains in some intrinsic way true to her photographic practice, one in which she singles out elements of Stein’s word-world for us to look at, to take into the mouth, to feel.

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Eve Fowler at Mier Gallery The Difference is Spreading, 2015, installation view.

There is intimacy here and overlap. We move through her to move through Stein to move through her, moving through and with ourselves all the while. Boundaries shift, flow. We are intertexted, entangled, touching upon, between. Across a distance of nearly a century, Fowler’s work literally commingles with Stein’s: gets close to it, pulls strands out, knits phrases back in, asks us to be near it, to think toward it. In this way, Fowler’s new work indexes queer temporality, embodying the way in which a 100 years becomes no distance at all when one queer body writes itself to another: receiving, returning, a forever pleasure that has closeness at its core. This is difference and it is spreading, Fowler seems to say—or Stein, and Stein—an exercise in unfolding and in pleasure. You can please me. And so she we I do.

Artillery—Litia Perta, May 2015

 

Published: 31st July 2015

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