Hi dear - and if you’re new here, welcome. Thank you for being here.
I apologize for the long silence - March and April were wearily drawn out. There were many cold and rainy days, grey sky days, days where I sought the light with all my might but struggled to find. It was heartache - trembling in precarious uncertainty, with wavering faith in patience, paralyzed. Brief escapes provided only temporary relief - five days wallowing in Mexico City’s ebullience, a long weekend healing in the bay’s familiar embrace - but the pain always finds its way to return. One cannot flee forever.
I began resisting documentation. I wrote words I did not publish. I took photographs I did not share. I was convinced I needed to be surrounded by light to emanate light, that the light cannot be tamed in darkness, however external or self-inflicted. Gradually, I realized perhaps this is still a all a grand trial in seeing, in resilience, in peering as hard as I can through the gloom to catch the crepuscular rays striving to break through. They’re there. They’re fighting their way out. Hang on.
“We’re nothing but brief bodies. Hearts, fragile as parakeets. Spit, lips, and longing.”
—
’s poem, My mother says kissing a man without a mustache is like eating eggs without saltSo heartache is life-affirming too. To traverse the full emotional range - piercing, shattering, and to find faith again in mending - is painfully beautiful. It’s the spirit of kintsugi, to accept the vicissitudes of existence, the impermanence of all things, to mend the cracks with of broken pottery with gold, illuminating the damage.
Tennessee Williams wrote that “I suppose life always ends badly for almost everybody. We must have long fingers and catch at whatever we can while it is passing near us.” I do suppose we’re merely a moment of attention. The only reality is the present: waves of undulating emotion, gaining momentum, crashing and receding, washing the world anew.
Now, in this week of hard-earned perfect weather, I embark on a sharing Array, a new segment on Taming the Light. An array is an ordered series in a linear format. Here, Array is my experimental foray into more structured curatorial work: a virtual gallery of art I consumed or created recently, organized around a central prompt. In lieu of formal wall labels, there’s marginalia.
This first Array is inspired by the following passage from Annie Dillard’s Pilgrim at Tinker Creek which aptly encapsulates the last few months for me:
I hope you enjoy.
ARRAY
the waves are roiling with beauty like sharks
Curated by Lyndsey Kong
Unternehmen Barbarossa (Operation Barbarossa), 1975-2013. Anselm Kiefer. Gelatin silver print, in steel frame. 29 1/4’’ x 50 1/4’’.
Part of Anselm Kiefer: Punctum, on view at Gagosian Madison until July 3, 2024
Curator’s notes:
Invasion. Attack. Theater of war. Sieges and surges, broken. Past casualties frozen in time. Heartache. Heartbreak. Fragments and lesions.
Western Dream, Helen Frankenthaler, 1957. Oil on unsized, unprimed canvas.
On view at The Metropolitan Museum of Art
Curator’s notes:
Landscape, sky, breeze, heat, and turf - is this a hallucination? Cacophony of the mind? But some delicate repose still shimmers through the translucency of the soak stains. Wait - a tornado of dusty blue blows past mustard yellow. Crab orange gains ground. Organic energy brewing, swarming, breaking out. It is dynamism after all - roiling, laving, vivacious.
Detail, Untitled (Two Cakes), Wayne Thiebaud, 1988. Oil on paper mounted on panel. 28 3/4’’ x 29 3/4’’.
Part of Wayne Thiebaud: Summer Days, on view at Acquavella Galleries until June 14, 2024
Curator’s notes:
Ah, the beloved candy-colored impasto laid on like soft ripples, the dramatic shadow. These are of course two cakes, but I couldn't help but stand closer to look even more intently. Eventually, a new landscape emerged: a tranquil cerulean fjord runs between two tall cliffs. This is still water. A warm, indulgent passageway - release, relief - to the distant serenity I longed for.
Silver snuffbox, French (Paris), Maker unknown.
Gift of Mr. and Mrs. Charles Wrightsman to the Metropolitan Museum of Art.
Curator’s notes:
As the roiling waves recede, may we find treasures by the shore.
Detail, Land's End, 2003-7. Wayne Thiebaud. Oil on canvas. 30 1/8’’ x 30 1/8’’.
Part of Wayne Thiebaud: Summer Days, on view at Acquavella Galleries until June 14, 2024
Curator’s notes:
I love the fluidity of the meandering bend, the frothy foam, the striated turquoise, sapphire, mint, and indigo contouring lands end - but even more so the sense of wonder one must have there: small, on the precipice of vast grandeur, powerlessly awestruck. Where lands end, boundlessness begins.
Wonder (Water of the San Francisco Bay), Lyndsey Kong. Shot on iPhone. 2024.
Curator’s notes:
A shimmering afternoon in SF: my footsteps followed the land to its end. The walk began at the top of Presidio Heights, descended through the tall pines and cypress of the Presidio, then eventually down to Crissy Field Beach. The Golden Gate Bridge glistened in the distance. I lingered here for long, mesmerized. This saline misty moisture in the air, the live water and light. What an enigma it is that undulating waves spit out flecks of moon dust, these dreamy stars and speckles.
At least we still have wonder.
Der gestirnte Himmel über uns und das moralische Gesetz in uns (The moral law within us, the starry heavens above us). 1969–2009 Gouache on black-and-white photograph. 33 3/4’’ × 43 1/2’’
Part of Anselm Kiefer: Punctum, on view at Gagosian Madison until July 3, 2024
Curator’s notes:
What delightful visual resonance between the stars here and the prior water! The starry heavens above us are indeed particles of the past, flung into the air from what became the bedrock of the present.
So I still stand here, succumbed to the deterministic forces within and above us, awaiting the freshest news, renewed and renewing, world without end.
“And perhaps that’s another of the paintings’ secrets: they satisfy so deeply because they offer us intimacy and distance at once, allow us to be both here and gone.
Here and gone. That’s what it is to be human, I think—to be both someone and no one at once, to hold a particular identity in the world (our names, our place of origins, our family and affectional ties) and to feel that solid set of ties also capable of dissolution, slipping away, as we become moments of attention.”
— Mark Doty, Still Life with Oyster and Lemon