a selection of works and text around my train commute to and from grad school
fellow rider: we’re almost there… and then we’ll have to get up tomorrow and do it all over again {sounds of a train coming to a stop} I chuckled, he chuckled we haven’t seen one another since but I didn’t really get a good look at him so I could be wrong.
At the start of making these pieces with and around my commute to and from a home and a husband in Washington DC to a grad school and a studio in Baltimore Maryland, I had no idea what the final pieces would end up being. No destination in mind, no proverbial light at the end of the proverbial tunnel. All I knew was that this continuous motion was bound, contained and at the same time endless. How fluidly it could go from hellish to dreamy, to merely a means to an end and back again. And of how even these words would break down, open up and reverse course on me. Of how the hellishness of exhaustion and alienation could become comforting or dreamy and of how the dream could become circumvention.
(commute jetty)
Looking down at my feet as I move on the commute, the specter of Smithson’s walk on the jetty kept coming up and into my mind. Smithson’s spiral way out in the red Salt Lake desert of “America’s Dead Sea” is monumental, literally and figuratively, in the land and in the art cannon, as they say. The commute less so with its repetition and mapped containment and yet it too is a major thing that shapes time and space in contemporary life and being. I tried to take the surface of the photograph’s inherent dialectic as the walking and the looking down at the path of the commute, as one moves and is moved. A path in an endless closed-looped system, recorded through the programmed apparatus of the camera. I began longing for the path and for the photograph to spiral, to twist, or to swim out, into an ever ascending or descending crystalline spiral. A new jetty.
˘ ˘ Fellow riders
Going from monumental spiral to mass-produced discarded trash. Back on the commute, it is hard to strike up a conversation with my fellow riders, everyone is tired, exhausted, rushed, wary, suspicion of their surroundings. If you see something say something, ringing in the ear and into the body, becoming eerie muscle memory. So, I went searching for my fellow riders in another way. I started collecting the hidden trash in the nooks and crannies of the seats and aisles. And after amassing a few hundred pieces, I could see the commonalities emerge, of lotto tickets, candy wrappers and other ways of temporarily soothing the body, such as heat and ice pads for all the fleshy pain of the commute.
& 20 redacted poem manuals have been put back on the train
Simple premise. It’s been done before of course, no reason not to do it again:
Written through erosion, turning instruction into levity and mirth. They were found, taken, deconstructed, and reconstructed on new terms and then returned. A subtle offering to my fellow riders, who may still refuse, ignore or even entirely miss this frivolous gift.
Presented in the gallery as maps and poems describing their re-placings, along with train car numbers so as to provide the ability for gallery goers to perhaps seek them out, happen upon them or even to notify the Marc train of their whereabouts in order to “rat me out”.
They sit quietly on the train, waiting to be seen, taken or refused till ready.
/\ make shifting
Making things up as you go along, making-shifting one’s way through time and space, in the idle moments of the ride, building silly temporary sculptures with the ubiquitous overlooked object of the safety manual pamphlets. Making them without “dwelling” on them too much, making them in the time and space of the continual dwelling of the commute.
Knowing there would be no way to transport them fully outside their moment, their precarious placings, their rickety richness, their wavering walls. There still was the desire to capture, record, transmute, and ferry them into other physicalities. So, I snapped some pics with my phone and then printed them out and attempted to recreate the forms they were depicting. And even though they depicted a recorded and removed moment, they still relied on being make-shift and temporary and could collapse at any time as they could on the train. Was this a way to make the photograph “wholly manifest” and “self-sufficient”? I think the answer is still no, but I’m ok with that. Being haunted by wholeness and self-sufficencies, is how it feels to be a person, a body, which are little words for saying: a temporary being. Why try to push against that? Instead, it is better to sway, teeter and stay “wholly un-manifest”, an unruly object.
_ _ trying to walk in the same footsteps as yesterday [as a book]
Appearing at first as, uncomplicated prompt, quickly devolving into a maddening impossibility. Set on the marble grid in the main hall of Union Station in Washington DC. A hall constructed to instill a sense of greatness in the white western grand narrative. Subliminal architectural moves. Flanked high in the rafters with stone Roman “warriors” at the ready, a past repeatedly invoked by various nations, at various moments in time. A timeless war waged against the present.
In trying to walk in the same footsteps as yesterday, a futility and absurdity reveals itself visibly. Now printed as a book, an accordion folding and unfolding, front and back reversing back into itself. No beginning and no end in sight. Perhaps we could try our hand at creating new paths? Ones that step more lightly into time, into being here with one another now?
Kristofer Heng 
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