Sheila Chukwulozie, Blue Christmas

21/12/2018 - 06/01/2018

This year, 16/16 celebrates blue as the colour of the holidays instead of green, red or white. It is the colour of everything: ups and downs, hot and cold, the ocean and the sky, certitude and paradox. This year, we invite artist Sheila Chukwulozie to interpret this metaphorical colour with an installation titled Mood Indigo.

“We love to contemplate blue, not because it advances to us, but because it draws us after it.” - (J.G)

**

At the end of my last love affair, my lover wanted to hold on. I was averse. Not to him, but to the holding. I wasn’t sure he understood that distance wasn’t always a house without a roof, or a cup without a lid, or a shirt with a missing button or whatever else it is in the world that stands incomplete without two ends reaching for a close.

“The color of [] distance is the color of an emotion, the color of solitude and of desire, the color of there seen from here, the color of where you are not. And the color of where you can never go. For the blue is not in the place those miles away at the horizon, but in the atmospheric distance between you and the mountains. “Longing,” says the poet Robert Hass, “because desire is full of endless distances.” Blue is the color of longing for the distances you never arrive in, for the blue world.” - (R.S)

The distance I knew was a terrain, a portal into the never ending ‘almost’ that ignites what we have come to know as paradox. To be and not to be- the question is the answer. The answer is the distance that stretches as far into length as it does into depth. Far and wide, heavenly and abysmal, light and dark, the distance between our origin and our end is us...the (2+2) of (4).

“We treat desire as a problem to be solved, address what desire is for and focus on that something and how to acquire it rather than on the nature and the sensation of desire, though often it is the distance between us and the object of desire that fills the space in between with the blue of longing. I wonder sometimes whether with a slight adjustment of perspective it could be cherished as a sensation on its own terms, since it is as inherent to the human condition as blue is to distance? If you can look across the distance without wanting to close it up, if you can own your longing in the same way that you own the beauty of that blue that can never be possessed? For something of this longing will, like the blue of distance, only be relocated, not assuaged, by acquisition and arrival, just as the mountains cease to be blue when you arrive among them and the blue instead tints the next beyond. Somewhere in this is the mystery of why tragedies are more beautiful than comedies and why we take a huge pleasure in the sadness of certain songs and stories. Something is always far away.” (R.S)

My lover was an artist who collected artist books like the one I gave him

On the first page, I left with an irony:

“To crave and to have are as like as a thing and its shadow. For when does a berry break upon the tongue as sweetly as when one longs to taste it, and when is the taste refracted into so many hues and savors of ripeness and earth, and when do our senses know any thing so utterly as when we lack it? And here again is a foreshadowing -- the world will be made whole. For to wish for a hand on one's hair is all but to feel it. So whatever we may lose, very craving gives it back to us again.”(M.R)

There, in a book like others he collects, rests a reminder that his control over the circle of time and space is limited. Let him keep wondering to himself; Is it possible that all the margins of the universe are better savored than solved?

“The blue of distance comes with time, with the discovery of melancholy, of loss, the texture of longing, of the complexity of the terrain we traverse, and with the years of travel. If sorrow and beauty are all tied up together, then perhaps maturity brings with it not ... abstraction, but an aesthetic sense that partially redeems the losses time brings and finds beauty in the faraway." (R.S)

In the distance of melancholy, of longing and of complexity, let him be so blue that the surface fire of love’s red burns out, into the blue apex of its furthest heat. And then, as he tosses and turns in 1670 degrees Farenheit of hurt and heart, surely, either hopelessness or awe can bring him to contend with a world that is both bigger than us and yet, because of us.

Some things we have only as long as they remain lost, some things are not lost only so long as they are distant.”(R.S)

Writers:

(J.G)- Johanne Wolfgang Goethe

(R.S)- Rebecca Solnit

(M.R)- Marilynne Robinson