The Whole Sensory Event

We're here for an online exhibit of images brought together, in part, for what they have to say about togetherness and isolation. Please know that I am sorry to talk about this thing that is by now mostly just exhausting and full of sorrow but I can’t ignore the context of the pandemic and the hesitant and celebratory moment of re-opening I find myself in.

Springtime where I live is a sensory spectacle. It is joyous, excessive, overwhelming, extravagant, and as spring wilts into summer, it leaves sidewalks strewn with bruised bright pink detritus. After a year of restraint in touching, smelling, tasting, holding those beyond my nearest and dearest, springtime is almost too much to bear. The thought of being near unfamiliar people makes me quiver. It's a thrill to see body hair, an awkward smile, skin touching skin, blood, lips, limbs flung in joyous abandon, and the way we style ourselves as a community. But of course, I’m only sitting at a desk typing on my laptop, this is an online exhibit of photographs, and these are vicarious thrills removed and abstract.

Photographs are always a removal from some event. Some spectacles here are much more than once removed: A young woman’s nudity is now a story thousands of years old, it’s almost impossible to imagine how many degrees removed the blood dripping from the crown of thorns onto Christ’s face is from the original moment of spectacle, each young pageant queen framed here is now grown, perhaps mother to the Coal Princess of tomorrow. Every moth seen here is now dead, maybe the dog, the fish, and some people too. The green and white arches of the swimming pool knocked to the ground and the particular pattern of tire tracks and footprints in the sand redrawn perhaps thousands of times by now. A photograph is so often an object of longing for what once was and this collection of photographs produce a longing for the whole sensory event.

After a year+ of reaping all I can from small, lonely miracles and performances by insects, trees, and rays of light, I long for a crowd, an extravagant show, a public celebration or mourning, the awkward, the outrageous, and the artificial, a misstep, the thrill of many bodies, a forced smile, skin touching skin, the brief whiff of hairspray, something publically tangible.

All this longing might make you think I’ve forgotten that sometimes, the performed spectacle experienced as one person in an audience is just as lonely as watching a private show performed by moss. I wonder if someday soon I’ll long for the thrill of witnessing a beam of light hit a tree, tire tracks left by long-gone trucks, the moment in the night that only I see, and the boredom that eventually swells into another spectacular moment.

Perhaps, by now, more of us know that sometimes the most sublime spectacle is the one we experience alone. Maybe we are familiar with the impact of the light on a tree or a moth’s wing. Maybe more of us have meditated on the texture and temperature of stone and experienced shock and awe at the sea mist or wildflowers.

- Nellie Lamb