A dinosaur toy grows in a glass of water
Lucas Regazzi
Live streamed November 20-24, 2017 from 9:30am – 6:30pm ET

Exhibition text by Zoe Koke

You are alone at a party and your body becomes the walls. You are liquid.
invisible yet totally unavoidable, a freshly mopped floor.

I stretch in my bedroom in the morning light and notice the places where my skin folds,
a body burdened by itself.

You and I hold the fat of our stomachs on different continents.

What is this and who is it for? A stranger asks, cupping her elbows, eyes rounded.

Everytime I go through a scanner I walk cautiously,
my body knows things I do not.

There was a time when a friend told me, if only to remind me, that I was my body
This was a challenge to both form and language

The task has become a clumsy crusade
a trying hike through a gulf to clutch oneself,
a weary sport to remove the cheese-cloth,
the between

There has been sex a number of times in which I feel I am floating.
Watching strangers from an aerial view, a drone flying low over sheets.
There is always fresh cut grass below white bedding.

I never come if I don’t know a person well enough
If I can’t be convinced that they want me not an idea,
if I don’t feel like I have been reminded enough of my own existence

“I am here.”

I have a pin that states this loudly from where it rests on my dresser.
The sentiment is exhausting, yet necessary.
It was given to me after Trump was elected,
another moment in history to launch many disappearances,
another moment to find the cheese-cloth

Can the body be liminal?

A dinosaur toy grows in a glass of water.

Those swelling animal toys are fleshy and familiar, like new breasts.

Is transformation always a surprise?

One whole arm used to dive bravely into the cereal box to fish for toys
cardboard chafing armpits, unabashed
One’s nakedness invisible rather than revelatory
before the moment of separateness

For me, it was a window, a figure and wind through white blinds.
These blinds will haunt me all my life, I know this.
And suddenly, I came to meet a body that warranted protection.
Immediately, I was aware of the space of my shadow

Today, I feel my limbs awaken through sand from a life already lived
Blanketed by my weary choreography.
Ie. How/who/what/when did I touch and why?

There is an unknowable distance that I feel from my limbs and maybe you do too from yours,
hence the want for reminders, the need to clutch, this poem, the between
A yellow plain to traverse, maybe your distance is a deep green valley.

Yet I will never know the quality of the storms you may witness there,
I won’t know to what degree you feel you exist, in comparison with the degree I feel I exist.
although I do know there is a spectrum.

Lucas Regazzi (b. 1995) is an emerging artist, curator and poet based in Montreal, Quebec. His work has been recently featured in the Haunt Journal of Art at the University of California, Irvine and Montreal-based publication Bad Nudes. Aside from maintaining an artistic and curatorial practice, Lucas is the sitting Art Director for the Void Magazine at Concordia University, and will be receiving his Bachelor’s of Fine Arts in Photography and Art History from the institution in 2018.

Zoe Koke (b. 1989) is a writer/artist based in Los Angeles. Her work is an archive of gestures to reconcile pressures on the body and the limits and possibilities for inner transformation under patriarchal capitalism. She has presented work in both institutional settings and DIY spaces in Montreal, Calgary, New York, Seattle and Melbourne, above all loving collaborative exchanges. She is currently pursuing her MFA in Photography at UCLA.