ladder in my neighbors yard, 2020
Digital projection, latex, wood, paraffin wax, pigment

Constance and I spent a lot of time while we were working together on my thesis talking about the breakdown of barriers between individuals and collectives, about queerness and utopia and the possibility for other ways of being with each other. I’m sitting on my third-floor fire escape in Ridgewood, Queens in week seven or three or five of the quarantine. It is a small slatted crate suspended next to an overgrown tree that spills newly green leaves into its metal boundaries. There’s a distinct, strange feeling here of living both in and out of a fixed space or dimension. I’m in the air and the ground and the tree but also my windowsill. It’s a highly fragmented but communal space, connected as it is to a series of fire escapes and backyard spaces that span a city block. I resist the urge to think of the space in front of me as a screen.

A dozen or so birds erupt dramatically in a chorus. I try to map the sound. As I hadn’t been paying much attention prior to the uproar, my map starts in the center. Spatially, the sound is clustered in a small area among the limbs of the tree I share the fire escape with. The cluster moves slowly, as a unit, but I can almost identify the individual high-pitched chirps in the tumble. Abruptly, the sound starts to dissipate in space but not in volume and the sound returns to what I imagine it was before I noticed. I see a huge metal ladder in the next yard. Maybe it used to hold wet clothes after washing. Sweat from the day’s labor evaporates into the air, in which we all breathe through small sheets of linen now.

Stewart Stout
MFA ‘19
www.stewartstout.com
@stewart.stout