Towards is pleased to present Ranch Dressing, an exhibition of new paintings by Toronto-based artist Dana Slijboom.
SURFACE DRESSINGS
By Kate Kolberg
I keep inching toward the door, trying to leave this place, and somewhere in the rush winter wasn’t spring. the flowers, perennials, the ones you call dependable, remind me learn patience, pattern, cycles, be a repeater to find bloom. my departure turns itself languid takes on a crawl. See how my will is like gelatin, subject to change and ambivalence. It melts and can move, change shapes, how you see me . Can’t muster the effort to leave, or just won’t. the door is now a little farther than before. won’t make up my mind about anything, forcing all options to combat, pressure-cook choices to Beings. But as liquid, or fluid, im easy, comfortably loiter in states of mutation. Have no good sense of the ridge that defines me, just melt and become when i can. Tell myself, resist the melt, be unfailing, a repeater. because, I know im not alone here, please forgive me when I forget you. scared to let you watch me shape, iterate, open failures to observance. so I itch, and envy those with patience for inertia, wishing I was instead born unyielding. Someone watchful, a Cycladic woman, tirelessly, arms-folded, measuring how one limb waits on another. But i haven’t got my balance right, and my arms aren’t yet nesting, so I amble in the plausible trying to configure my next puddle. a body unfamiliar – don’t know my foot from my hip – but I practice making evidence of each way I have been. The gelatin is material, seeped under my skin like the sun, it co-opts my tongue and speaks from my gut “not like this, try again,” “find your foot, put it down.” Im not going to be like those flowers or those ladies made in stone but I learn to graze my surroundings, take easy grass blades and turn them to milk. It’s a labour for consistency, forging some dependability: stay-put, rise and fall, melt and cool, find my foot on the ground with my hip just above it, learn pleasure in frustration, states of anticipation
