Chapter I

Summers used to compete with geological eras over which landscapes shift and warp, creasing the skin, making our voice raspier on cigarettes and bourbon. We’d sink deep into the olive green couch, yellow light exposing the dust lifting around us as we’d flip through a stack of soft porn books, amusing and arousing ourselves with cheap incomplete words of some dudes trying themselves at the same thing before us...

This codependency of desire and shame is Nana Wolke’s criteria for the montage of scenes, each painting prolonging a moment in time. As Wolke turns 27, a year announcing itself as a beginning as much as a glorified end of it all, she revisits both personal and fictional short scenes, but most importantly, glimpses that can no longer be identified as either, lost to the seduction of cultural image and unreliability of one’s own memory. In a stubborn attempt to own up to this patchy reality, she works through topics of distance, sex, friendship, and obliteration. The starting point of each work is photographical restaging of scenes focused on light and point of view, allowing for a dance, or sometimes a stumble at best, between narratives.

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