[EXHIBITION REVIEWS] Capturing the Moment! An Illusion of Permanence
Laughing at my cringey poetry and a reflection on the absurdity of trying to preserve passing moments
It is just so embarrassing looking back at old writing, especially when it was an attempt to capture some fleeting, raw emotion that felt monumental at the time. I recently stumbled across poems I wrote in my twenties, full of curated ennui, so desperate to memorialize the depth of feeling that I thought defined me. Reading them now, I can’t help but laugh with a kind of fond pity for that girl who believed that if she could just pin down the feeling in words, she could keep it. And I guess, in a way, she was right—I’ve kept this writing all these years. But what did I actually capture? Was I preserving reality, or was I constructing a version of it that fit the aesthetic I wanted to embody?
A relic from that era, unearthed for your amusement:
TO THE GROUND I GO
I was a human, industrious and high functioning
with every motivation to conquer this lifetime,
But I forgot
Because I became an octopus, I learned to hide away and
nobody could see me, still deceivingly intelligent and
stronger than I looked, but I became weak
And I’m a doe, long lashes seducing unsuspecting solicitors into
forgetting that I am wild and dirty and just
hungry, but it doesn’t matter anymore.
I emerged a snake—you think I mean manipulative, but
that’s too obvious, don’t you know? I got what I wanted
But my efforts were futile
A cicada, now I live for the sake of living and passively
I’ve accepted my existence to leave a shell,
white and haunting among the masses
Let me regress to a fern but
Don’t forget about me, please just mist me gently
I won’t be unfurling nor revealing myself to you any longer
Okay, now that you’ve suffered through that cringey bit, a quick announcement! And perhaps this explains why I’ve been thinking a lot about documentation: what it captures, what it changes, what it inevitably leaves out. I’ve been working on Soft Focus, a new video series with my friend and collaborator Hunter the Gatherer. We’re setting out to create something different from the usual artist interviews, something that doesn’t just frame artists within the grand narratives of art history or theory but instead lets them exist in the quiet, personal spaces where their work is made. We want to capture what making art feels like, rather than simply what it looks like. It’s a project about presence, about seeing artists as they are, rather than how they’re often framed. We start shooting interviews next week, so keep an eye out for the video features. The best place to follow us is on Instagram at @softfocusseries, and the full length videos will be posted on our YouTube. Now, on to the exhibition review!
“Frosted Visions” by Alexander Long
Book & Job Gallery (San Francisco - Tenderloin), on view through March 7, 2025
This question of preservation—what we hold onto and what we lose in the act of memorializing—lingered as I walked through “Frosted Visions,” a collection of works by Alexander Long that reimagines cake, one of the most ephemeral objects, as something fixed and unyielding, its delicate form considered as a frame for photographs.
There are two things you should know about me, if you don’t already. First, I am skeptical of photography exhibits. Second, I love cake. Neither of these are particularly deep takes, but I’ll explain! With photography, I always hope for something that challenges the straightforward act of documentation, whether through alternative processes, unexpected choices, or just something different. And cake? Well, it’s just so nostalgic, celebratory, aesthetic.
Long’s fake cakes, precisely piped in that classic grocery-store style, serve as frames for a variety of images. Some are uncanny, like a cake clock. Others are comically meta, such as a cake featuring an image of another cake. And have you ever actually ordered a photo cake that didn’t look like something out of a low-budget horror film? Long’s artworks, instead, exist in the realm of how I’ve always wished images would present on cakes—eerily perfect, like a memory airbrushed beyond recognition. The result is something that isn’t quite still life, isn’t quite prop, but something else entirely: a relic of a moment that never actually happened.
The longer I looked, the more I felt a fixation on memory that, in its effort to preserve, had drained the life from the thing it meant to keep alive. These cakes exist in a state of perpetual anticipation, waiting to be cut and consumed, yet remaining untouched. Long’s work teeters between nostalgia and artificiality, between the tenderness of memory and the rigidity of a replica. A cake is meant to be eaten; a celebration is meant to end. But what happens when we trap those things in a state of permanence? Do they retain their meaning, or does preservation render them hollow?
“video cake 1” and “video cake 2,” a two-part installation, display a live feed of a corner of the gallery, streaming from a camera positioned across the room. It’s a recording that isn’t quite a record, more surveillance than memory. Like the cakes, it pokes at the tension between experience and documentation, between what is real and what is constructed for remembrance. Watching the screen instead of the room itself, I felt a strange dissonance, as though my presence was being reflected back at me before I even had a chance to fully exist in the space. As my friends watched the larger feed across the room, I wondered: If someone watches a moment as it happens, is it still happening to you? Or does the act of watching create a parallel version, slightly altered, slightly unreal?
This past weekend, I tried reformer Pilates for the first time. My friend Tianna, a Pilates pro in the making, coached me through what I’m convinced was a torture device. Before we even started, I thought, we need to capture this. When Tianna is a Pilates legend and I am… well, a person who has tried Pilates, we will look back and laugh at this. But in hindsight, Tianna made sure I was focused on time and tension for the whole session. And the most memorable, lasting part of that day wasn’t the video we took but rather, my inability to laugh without significant soreness in my obliques for days after. That’s real—much more real than the footage of me flailing on the reformer which I’ve PERMANENTLY deleted.
I think about the photos I’ve taken—of friends, of fleeting joy, of quiet mornings steeped in warm light. I think about the notes I’ve written, my attempts to crystallize moments into something that will last. But “Frosted Visions” asks, does documentation make something more real, or does it strip it of the one thing that made it worth remembering in the first place?
“Frosted Visions” by Alexander Long is on view through March 7th at Book & Job Gallery!