In November of 2021, my immunocompromised ass got dangerously sick with Covid. I laid in bed for nine days and did nothing but watch all eight Harry Potter movies, text my oximeter readings to my mom, and take online geography quizzes. By day six I had memorized the political map of every continent, except Oceania.

I already knew that borders were abstract, constructive, and movable, but this awareness had been similarly theoretical, crafted by vaguely anarchist Vermont summer camps, a fancy undergraduate education, and socialist-left instagram reels. When you see these lines up close and learn to distinguish Togo from Benin and Tajikistan from Turkmenistan by nothing but their jagged contours, the farce of these lines becomes irrefutable. It was strangely shocking. As the persecuted protagonist of Nagisa Oshima’s film Death by Hanging asks—What is a nation? Show me one! I don’t want to be killed by an abstraction.

It was during this feverish time that Parker Ito DMed me on Instagram to ask if I wanted to do some sort of show together. My brain was stuck at Hogwarts and on the former Balkan Federation and I truly did think I was dreaming, which I expressed by responding ‘am I hallucinating lol.’ We weren’t close at that point and I couldn’t really fathom his reasoning, but I of course agreed.

I hadn’t been a Harry Potter enthusiast since middle school, when I read books 1–4 on trips to the hospital for colonoscopies and endoscopies and a million other diagnostic procedures. There was always so much waiting involved. I will admit that the books were crucial in helping me, mid-pubescence, summon courage before getting put under. Those of us who have had a camera stuck up our ass and/or been cut open while unconscious may have a keener sense of the abstract. A few days later, a doctor in a cutesy pediatric wing would play a video of my wet, tunneling insides on a small monitor in her office and dispense a few medical prognoses. One simply has to trust that these figurations, with their shitty resolution and dense, polysyllabic terminology, correspond to lived experience.

This past March, in the hopes of quitting smoking, I downloaded an app that provides guided hypnosis sessions. I wanted to quit before this show, perhaps as some sort of conceptual ‘work,’ or gesture, lol. Parker hates smoking. Parker’s likes and dislikes are vivid and intense; even his occasional ambivalence has a casual brutality to it. A symbolic shrug from him is rather deep and dense, like a black hole. I try to avoid it at all costs. I think the most effective artists usually entrench themselves in their tastes, allowing their flavor to steep and bolden like a tea bag in hot water. Parker embodies this, which I admire greatly. I am far too amenable.

I did not succeed in quitting smoking, but I use the hypnosis app often. In a lilting, mechanical voice, a woman counts down from five, telling you that you are sinking deeper and deeper. Each time, I have strangely found myself picturing that I am in the vast cave under Gringotts Wizarding Bank, riding in one of those rickety mine carts along the snaking, sloping tracks, descending into the dark vaults. Luckily, those antisemitic goblins aren’t around; my hosts are ill-defined shadowy beings, but certainly feminine and benevolent in nature. The cart stops at a small door, which opens into a dimly-lit bedroom. I crawl into the four-poster bed and luxuriate in its warmth, knowing that I am safely tucked away from the world, someplace no one can reach me. The shapeless women specters instruct me to do nothing but rest and sleep. It’s heaven! ‘Omg,’ I texted my bsf Tica after begrudgingly returning to the world actual for the first time. ‘The sunken place is real.’

In the tangible world I live in a studio apartment on the first floor of a two-story house. Alex and Sarah live upstairs. They are among the warmest and most considerate people I have ever met and our expanding friendship is one of the few things in my life that feels uncomplicatedly good. I often run into them in the yard as they leave for work or to walk their dog, and we chat, catch up briefly. Lately Sarah and I have been sharing semi-frequent ‘nightcaps’ during which we smoke a cig or two on the stairs. The conversations go everywhere. She is a talented audio engineer and musician. She also grew up in San Francisco, and, during one of these sundown assemblies, it occurred to me that it would fit to ask her to compose a song or track for the show at Climate Control. I’ll make some video for it, I told her. It will be like scoring in reverse.

Sarah delivered her shimmering composition in early May. I sat on it and by mid-June I still didn’t know what to film. About a week before the show opened, I had been working on my turmeric prints in the yard, getting them ready to bake in the sun once the UV hit its peak at around 1. Our outdoor space is peppered with shade from a crowd of ash, lemon, and black walnut trees, so I was exposing the prints in the driveway of the house next door. An elderly Japanese couple used to live there, but one of them died; the house has been sitting empty for years now. Lucky for me, Alex emerged from the top floor, about to head out to a gig. We hadn’t crossed paths in a while, and resolved to catch up. He suggested an excursion, which was when we both remembered our aspiration to visit an abandoned pumicite mine that he had once discovered by chance while offroading in the desert. The “Old Dutch Cleanser Mine,” it’s called.

Apparently pumice was a popular cleaning agent, and Old Dutch a common household item. This was rather aligned with the premise for my turmeric prints, which I made using a canister of the spice from my pantry and a surplus of rubbing alcohol that had been sitting under my sink. I love making do with what’s available—there’s great freedom to be found under constraints. Is that a truism by now? It’s still true. As Jasminne Morataya wrote in her peerless statement for a show—still up!—at Bass & Reiner, you can make fairly complete worlds with few tools and the thinnest thread of narrative. This has become my creed.

Alex drove us the two and a half hours to the desert, referencing a sparse offroading map as he rolled his jeep over the big rocks on the sandy high-clearance roads. We breached a degree of remoteness I have not experienced in years. The views stretched for miles, with no trace of human civilization but this one chiseled-out hole. The mine was unreal, deep, cool, powdery, and white. It became apparent that Alex’s drone was the best tool to capture the cavern’s plunging arcades, winding between the carved-out columns and into the absolute darkness. ‘I feel like I’m performing a colonoscopy,’ Alex quipped as he eyed the drone’s snaking view from his controller. I laughed and suddenly remembered the stony vault from Potter lore that I had been reconstructing in my mind, truly stunned by the resemblance. Had my hypnotized subconscious prophesied this voyage, or compelled it? Is there even a difference between the two?

There’s a terrific interview with Nabokov, in which a poor, sweating interviewer asks the author whether he, akin to EM Foerster, loses control of his characters and allows them to dictate the course of his novels. “My knowledge of Mr. Forster’s works is limited to one novel, which I dislike,” Nabokov replies. (Lol!) “It was not he who fathered that trite little whimsy,” he adds. “It is as old as the quills, although of course one sympathizes with his people if they try to wriggle out of that trip to India or wherever he takes them. My characters are galley slaves.”

Ezra was asking Parker about his use of AI-generated imagery yesterday, and this quote—one of my favorites, in truth—came to mind. Maybe I’m more like Foerster, choosing a process or technique as a framing device, finding myself at its whim and simply hoping for the best. A superstructure that is pristine only in its platonic form.  (The turmeric / India connection does not aid in dispelling this comparison.) Within this analogy, Parker is undoubtedly Nabokov; he bends AI, and his printer, and his solar dye, and his many invocations of Japanese yokai and pictographs and familiar figures, to his pure will. He is all base, building from the ground up, stone by heavy stone. I prophesize, he compels. Do we end up in the same place? Not in idea, but in reality, sure—we’re both here at the same space, in the same show, aren’t we?

—Juliana Halpert

Juliana Halpert (b. 1989, Montpelier, Vermont) is an artist and writer living in Los Angeles. Her writing has appeared in Aperture, Artforum, Bookforum, Frieze, Art in America, and X-TRA, among other publications. Her website is : julianahalpert.com

Parker Ito (b. 1986, Ventura, CA) is an artist associated with Post Internet or Zombie Formalism, depending on who you ask. His website is: www.parker.sex

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