We Found A Well: Feather Chiaverini and Natasha Fortson Written by Clare Nicholls
I write this essay in snatched scraps of time, like a chicken scratching in the dirt for one last kernel. I outline on the backs of receipts on the train, I compose in my head as I walk, I dictate to my phone as I drive to my next job. We Found A Well is a manifesto about time. Feather Chiaverini and Natasha Fortson compose an installation that flexes time as a material, a thing as malleable as fabric, paper, and clay.
First, the well: bricks arranged in a circle, stacked, mortarless like ancient walls. The bricks are colorful and handmade, off-kilter and slightly seeping. They could be anything, foam or fabric or childrens clay or icing. Some are wrapped in photographs of huge glittering rhinestones on matte paper.
The well is not the first thing one sees. The room is full of guardians. A mythical snake-bird corkscrews up towards the ceiling, topped with two grotesque faces. The faces echo the ad hoc hand of Peter Schumann, Bread and Puppet Theater, and the Whole Earth Catalog, of hand built clay, but they are slapdash latex over foam. They are comedy and tragedy overlooking this oasis.
Encircling the well is a green figure, straggling it with their legs, heart out and veins tumbling forth. Their enlarged hand lifts in an ambiguous gesture of greeting or stopping. Beyond this long long body are two legless bodies, copying the posture of grandfather pillows. They slouch and nod, creating the boundary of the installation. There is a narrow path to walk around the well, towards these bodies, and stand underneath a constructed palm tree. From here, you can look into the well: the bottom is blue silk and a delicate salt spiral.
The entire show is hit with ooze, melt, higgledy-piggledy—a sensation like the smear between an animation's keyframes. Real materials mingle with faux at every turn: real dirt, flowers, and pomegranate seeds are scattered throughout, whereas beads, embroidery, and paint are used to signify more than just themselves. The luxuriousness of real ostrich feathers contrast with the slick poly material of neoprene and mesh.
Time travel has been a staple of speculative fiction since its inception; queer time posits that we travel through time in fits and starts, and have the ability to live in the past, present, and future simultaneously. Elizabeth Freeman writes in Time Binds: Queer Temporalities, Queer Histories on time as a construct of capitalist overculture:
[...] corporations and nation-states seek to adjust the pace of living in the places and people they take on: to quicken up and/or synchronize some elements of everyday existence, while offering up other spaces and activities as leisurely, slow, sacred, cyclical, and so on and thereby repressing or effacing alternative strategies of organizing time.1
Queer time is another method of organizing time, that is, the stuff of life. We experience the multiplicities of time not in a linear sense but also as a haunting, hallucination, the cycles of the moon and stars, a science fiction novel. With queer time we are not forced to divvy up our lives into eight hour chunks of work, rest, and what we will—as glad as I am the eight hour work day is the norm, most of our jobs are precarious, gig-based, commutes and emails infringing on our hours of rest and what we will. These figures guard our time and let us rest at the well. We commune with the portal within the well, a timeless space. We can feel time expanding within us, healing the split of work/life divisions.
The figure of the zombie features in the draping palm leaves in the back corner of the installation. Green painterly bodies sag gracefully, outlined in vivid red fringe. Zombies originate in Haitian folklore, a vision of an enslaved person's worst fear: even death is not freedom from forced labor. Here these zombies are an essential part of this oasis, shading us as we rest. They grow from a tree trunk of athletic mesh vented with wig hair. The fruit of the tree are the beckoning gloved hands of drag queens. The tree does not work. No tree works. The laborers that are represented in the tree, the masc athlete, the femme performer, and the ever suffering zombie, are finally at rest and beyond work.
The reality of these objects in space, the proprioceptive and haptic sense they inspire, invites us to that time beyond work right now. Immediately. A friend said to me recently that they think they never have time to make art, but they need to start making time. And that's the fact of it, of the context of hetero-capitalistic organized time, that our time is always snatched, stolen, snuck away. We Found A Well does not ask us to make time, to steal it away like an underage punk filching cigarettes. Our relationship to time is like the magician's neverending rope of scarves: expansive, productive, under our control.
1. Elizabeth Freeman, Time Binds: Queer Temporalities, Queer Histories (North Carolina: Duke University Press, 2010) xii.
Bibliography
Freeman, Elizabeth. Time Binds: Queer Temporalities, Queer Histories. North Carolina: Duke University Press, 2010.
Bio
Clare Nicholls is a weaver, lace maker, and poet exploring textiles as texts. She earned an MFA in Fiber & Materials Studies at Tyler School of Art and Architecture in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania in 2022. Previously, she obtained a BA in Art and Art History from St. Mary’s College of Maryland in 2010, and a Post-Baccalaureate Certificate from MICA in 2013. Her work has been exhibited nationally, most recently at Axis Gallery in Sacramento, CA. She lives and works between Baltimore and Philadelphia, and rides many trains.
Feather Chiaverini is a fiber and performance artist from Florida currently based in Philadelphia, PA. Feather has received degrees from the College of Creative Studies in Detroit, MI and Tyler School of Art in Philadelphia, PA. He has shown work nationally at Trout Museum of Art, N’namdi Center for Contemporary Art, Temple Contemporary, ROY G BIV Gallery, and more. Currently he is the Residency Director of the Queer Materials Lab and adjuncts at the Tyler School or Art.
Natasha Fortson is a New York-based multidisciplinary artist and curator with a focus in oil painting, printmaking, and sculpture. She combines her traditional fine art upbringing with her BFA in graphic design from Pratt Institute and Elisava School of Design and Engineering. She is a recent resident of Arquetopia Printmaking Residency Puebla and is currently enrolled in Manifesto, Arquetopia Residency. Natasha has crafted her curatorial career to promote international connections between artists, most recently featuring Raíces, exhibited at Compére Collective.
