180
RED HOOK, NYC
INFORMATION
EXHIBITIONS
Mercy Clubhouse
36.8 Hours
Doliolida
Rituals of Recursion
EVENTS
ARTISTS
ETHOS
CONTACT
MERCY CLUBHOUSE
CREIGHTON BAXTER & AGNES WALDEN
3/07/25 - 4/04/25
CREIGHTON BAXTER & AGNES WALDEN
3/07/25 - 4/04/25
The unobstructed view is of her mouth, through the nearest castle wall. Every analogy in the air between her and I invokes feudal power or romanticized ruin. Two gestures make a surface. Her eyes are holes. Her towers are blurred, softened like they’ve been bruised. She stares through herself as two forms, more of a castle than a woman, more of a mask than a palace. Mercy Clubhouse is behind her. In the spire she would take aim at her enemies, throwing rotten fruit and coffee at men. Her mouth would open for the whole world to fly out. She’s about to say something I won’t like, and what I say in response won’t matter. Ribbon archways, landscape or hole or door. Two girls arriving together usually have a good shot. Noise and then flowers. Noise and then somewhere to stand. Noise and then women, or butterflies, or sentences. The subject is two people communing as the walls of comportment collapse. Mercy Clubhouse might lend permission to reach and fold and grin. The clubhouse beckons a particular tenor. They come here because they’re like this all the time. Linear medieval gazes, dividing pages and directing motion, bridging space, spirit, and motifs. Making something together is more fun than making something alone. It’s not rocket science. Her drawing hand is sharp and continuous like speech. She draws with diction. She repeats until something in the utterance cracks open. Even in small ways like the burying of a face’s expression by blacking out the eyes. She had to realize that each figure is not alone, and that these women’s accumulated parts are meant to make up a whole that she also can’t see. She deepens the space around them. She makes sandcastles that never get wet or blow away, but feel fragile enough that they might. She draws real wet and decisive. She picks up where we left off to cross us out for the sake of something bigger between friends. She finds herself looking around the floor when we draw and everything she has touched is left to dry, balancing somewhere, curling under its own heft and viscosity. Placed in the shade in a row, like tree cuttings not yet grafted. She shoves a turkey leg into the flower vase. She quickly conjures subjects in places that usually simmer. She never quite settles into drawing or writing until confessing something about the week, relationships, reading habits, recent griefs. It’s like a first concrete gesture, not as subtle as the experience of getting to know herself silently through drawing. She appears quiet but her laugh is loud, even after the executive orders. She talks about sex a lot, surprisingly so. Two is enough for a clubhouse. A room with no walls. A band with no instruments. No password needed. Mercy is a fact one drops into. Mercy Clubhouse must be the place inside these drawings. Can we demand mercy? Or must mercy be lateral? We prefer demands that suffering end. I would never ask a billionaire for mercy. We map mercy in formal, material, spatial, or collaborative valences. To both be at the mercy of the other – handing power back and forth in the closed circuit. Two batteries in a flashlight.