I write this text at a moment of transition, not knowing the works’ final forms, but rather understanding that what we’re tethering together is premised on a looseness in feeling. The name, or perhaps the desire not to name, comes from a studio visit I had with B. at the beginning of this process. We were looking at photographic moments, stills from everyday life, discussing our tendency to attribute meaning to things while still in the midst of witnessing their becoming.

To name something is to suggest that it as arrived somewhere. It’s a form of divination, like knowing the contents of a drawer before it’s been opened. The desire for the image to stabilize as it its event is still unfolding.  A drawing of edges around a thing, like the floor plan, which tells us where to enter, where to sit, where to gather, where to orient our belonging. And just how quickly these instructions are undone by living. That our dwelling here, like much of elsewhere, is a continuously unresolved process.

Still, now, it is impossible for me to separate these works from their temporary life in a home; their relationship not only to the function of living but to the intimacies of everyday life. I sit with them, eat with them, breathe with them, bathe with them. I wake in the morning with coffee and peel away the curtains and let the light draw in, watching as the shadows climb the walls, fill the gaps in their forms. They become the very things my eyes reach for without thinking; bodies temporarily residing within this place I also call home.

And too, this feeling is born from the perpetual unfolding of time into space. In the periphery of vision, like the edge of a face, a reflection that lingers momentarily on the panel of the door, the sound of metal as keys land in the dish on the way in, the slow drip of the tap that toils after you’ve taken your last glass of water to bed. The patchwork of holes in the ceiling, thick paint pooling on the floorboards until the image sticks longer than the works have been up.

We lay three cards on the table, knees buckled in the shag rug that we usually roll up behind the door. Past, present and future tangled together like the frayed ends of a knot.

— Ally Rosilio

In reflecting on the transition from exhibition space back into a home, I’ve been thinking a lot about the transitory and unformalized life of Carmine’s Room. For this final exhibition, I invited each artist to bring something that has remained unresolved in their practice: an existing work, a work in progress, an experiment, or something that has yet to settle into a final form.