Singalong
Ken Kagami, Anders Dickson, Sarah Lyn Rogers
16.03 – 23.04.2023
Sgomento Zurigo
Olivengasse 7 8032 Zürich
You are instructed not to ask what it
is.
You might say, “Tell me about this.”
That would be allowed.
And there are clues: what’s biggest in
the frame, how many fingers.
For some reason the sky won’t touch
the ground.
That’s fine—no need to worry over details like that.
Worry over your own self, skin and
hair, this mass that won’t conform or be obscured.
Have your edges ever felt so
distended?
In childhood you were—like any of
us—geometric, book of unlined paper, no marks.
Adults wore their experience like
scotch tape dragged across the carpet.
They picked up lint and flecks,
mysterious bumps.
Things you felt you oughtn’t be able
to see.
Experienced equated with obscene.
How a folded paper can never be
not-folded.
How the mouth’s assembly line uproots
the teeth you can’t repot.
You can’t go back, but you must go.
Some days you feel like a raw hunk of
meat, set with wire and electrified—some unseen hand pushes a button, makes you
twitch.
Some days a piano squashes you
cartoon-flat.
You spit keys.
Cannot blow out your candles.
Some days are deep-sea dives,
gathering specimens to understand.
To understand what?
The answer.
In your mind, you build construction
sites.
You drive one of the frightening
machines.
Here, you can lift impossible weights.
Break down and discard.
Nothing too much.
Back to skin, this looped image: lip
curl of yuck, ugly sneer.
(A face for lint, loosed teeth, an
errant pube.)
Why would somebody so often hand you
this?
This wordless alphabet of disgust?
With a child’s pride, as though
passing a craft into your hands:
I made this. I made it for you.
– Sarah Lyn Rogers