Presence today is a practice of training one’s attention to an environment by noticing how their body experiences it. Much like bird watching or pilates, activities that require diligence and leisure, the act of being present is treated as a healsall for body and mind. However, in Math Bass’ Full Body Parentheses at lumber room in Portland, presence exceeds a self-produced state of embodiment. Here presence is more like the weather, a force that acts on bodies continually whether it’s noticed or not.
Though presence is sensed everywhere in Full Body Parentheses, its source is dubious. There are signs of bodies: a ladder to be climbed in Ladder (2014) and a coat to be worn in Crowd Rehearsal (2017). Hedge (2013) has a tidy feeling like a motorboat that’s been covered for winter storage. Two pairs of jeans, one short and one long, sink upside down into the ground in Untitled (Brutal Set) (2015) and Brutal Set (2012). Rather than legs the rigid but jointless shape is given by concrete. Despite the many signs of their presence, bodies are not seen.
A paranoid read of the show attempts to locate and quantify bodies hidden throughout. I tried to count them with false confidence under the construction-orange canvas in Body No Body, Body (2018) but lost track in the Sound Towers (2018) where an indeterminate number of voices sings from four plywood boxes. Traces of the human form are lost completely in Childscape (2024), a site specific mural of an abstract horizon. The round edges of red flower petals set against green hills adopt a multi-dimensional tinge of blue. A classic mind-trick of color theory.
The feeling of presence without bodies in Full Body Parentheses recalls Kate Zambreno and Sofia Samatar’s inquiry on the tone of the hoard. They propose that in literature the hoard is more than the act of hoarding. Beyond a manifestation of shame and excess the hoard is “a way to store up, to attempt to survive the constancy of atmospheric precarity.”1
The hoard is the clinginess of objects as they take hold of us. It’s the energy that lingers in a room long after a person leaves it. It’s stylistic too, perceived in descriptions that go on and on and the use of more like to describe how something actually is. These are hoard signs. In a 2021 review, William J. Simmons noted that Bass’ work is more like a simile than a metaphor for its capaciousness of association and feeling. Like similes, maybe parentheses are hoard signs too.
Bass’ minimal forms blur distinctions between sources of sensation exaggerating the tendency of feelings to double and take flight without knowing who they belong to and where they have gone. Caught in a moment of dissociation I’ve been asked, Where did you go? Without having to physically change location “I” can split-off, leaving my body behind. Yet, in my absence, my body doesn’t disappear. When “I” am not present but my body remains, who do “I” become?
Seasonal Associate, a novel by Heike Geissler about a person who works at an Amazon fulfillment center, is narrated by two characters, “You” and “I.” Somatar and Zambreno suggest that the tone of the hoard in this novel outsources a singular point of view alleviating the intensity of one’s own experience as if to say, I can’t feel anymore, can you feel this for me? The hoard is extrasensory, more feeling than necessary, the way lovers feel each other’s feelings or the way pregnant people feel for two.
The stairway into Full Body Parentheses glows as a light-filtered epidermis or a mucous membrane. On the last landing of the steps hangs a small oil painting: Clouds (2024). The light transitions from gauzy orange to ephemeral blue as if being born or breaking through skin.
As I become familiar with the tone of Bass’ world, a new detail charges my senses, and I become unfamiliar again. In Protracted Blue (2024), blue crushed velvet curtains drape theatrically in the narrow entrance to lumber room. Upon entering a second time, a blue-ish halo materializes in a moment of rest around a skittish spotlight like an ocular migraine until the light darts off again. This cycle of defamiliarization is not so different from being caught by surprise by a person you claim to know as well as yourself.
At the same time that they can be interpreted throughout the space, bodies here seem unnecessary compared to the primacy of presence. Yours can become nonessential while standing inside of the twinned cement structures of the titular sculpture Full Body Parentheses (2024). Parentheses contain additional information that contributes to a text but is ultimately nonessential. They mark both difference and inclusion, directing the flow of need. The contents of parentheses are relieved of the labor of being needed while still belonging to the whole. From the corner, standing inside the distant hold of curved towers, nearly the whole gallery is in my purview. Looking out it feels as though the sculptures are looking back. While today’s treatment of presence limits people with no time for leisure or whose energies are perpetually spent, Bass’ hoards of feeling are a reminder that presence is in the air already acting on you. It’s like the weather or a persistent sound that has become silence. All it takes to feel it is a moment of liberation from being essential.
1 Zambreno, Kate, and Sofia Samatar. “Hoard, or an Unaired Room.” Tone, Columbia University Press, New York, New York, 2024, pp. 41–62.
Math Bass: Full Body Parenthesis
Lumber room, Portland, OR
April 13, 2024 to July 13, 2024
This review was made possible thanks to the support of our Art Writing Champion lumber room. Learn more about Variable West Art Writing Champions here.