Does it still snow in Providence?

Sam Pulitzer Does it still snow in Providence? October 26 - November 30 2024 You promise yourself never to drag your future kid into your art or your writing but when the oxytocin hits it hits differently. The three of us roam the Westcoastian inland landscape just beyond summertime pretending to be a Stone Age family in search for the gold of the forest, chanterelles. We love free food and especially one that is priced 449 SEK a kilo back in the capital. How does one index something so expensive yet so free, so precious yet abundant? We solve this by picking more than we’ll ever clean, parboil, freeze, re-heat and eat and will later leave it to rot in brown paper bags meant for recycling in the warmth of our kitchen. If the fruit of the earth were bought for a song, would there be any need to talk about the weather? The roam generated the idea to turn the table and ask Sam the questions. Did you read Walden as a teenager? Were you a teacher’s pet? Does free will exist? Does the Pope have a funny hat? If, then? Back in the car, baby Rosa fixates her 7-week old gaze onto a little neon-yellow fish, one of several stuffed animals (deep-sea creatures) and shapes (stars) that together make up the baby mobile attached to her baby car seat. She looks like a little cartoon mermaid that has just hit her head with a halo of objects spinning above her. The mobile was a hand-me-down gift from Romy, now 3 years old, via her father Sam. Children love babies because babies make them feel like big girls. It’s Rosas first Educational Complex and its terrific because she loves it, despite probably not being able to identify these stuffed symbols as stand-ins for actual fish, nor the concept of “fish”, nor the gravity of the “universe” or the zero gravity of the ”sea” that the mobile imitates, unless this knowledge lies dormant in her small body, all of us having been amoebas in our previous lives. Max wrote a stream-of-consciousness text for the group show Riffs earlier this spring that riffed on how he’d gotten to know each artist as well as guessing their hometown and their age. Sam was one of them. Max guessed that Sam was probably born in the mid-80s, perhaps in 1984 (or was it in 83?) and maybe in the state of New York. Sam contributed to the show with three questions scribbled around a door in the gallery. All of Sam’s questions come with a given answer and a glossary that explains their components in detail. Despite putting all strings attached to this rhetorical Jeopardy on display, each question takes you on a Little Big Adventure, assumingely differing depending on your socio-economical background and mood of the day. When Katarina on two occasions says that she finds it hard to entertain each question in its entirety and needs to digest them in bits, Sam answers with the questions “Oh, really?” and “What?”. Later, and curious about how abstract Sam could get, we approach him offering him to expand on these questions together with us. What would he show? Nothing? Sam had set up a provisional work area in front of a window that seemed to act as a portal for the New England goes Hammarby Sjöstad Gothic drawings that were laid out on the table underneath, bridging two distant places that according to Sam are not that distant at all, when you come to think of it. Katarina eagerly wanted to speak about the aesthetics of conceptual art. These days, something can look like a Hanne Darboven drawing but it’s not a score for something that has taken place or will take place, it’s just a pretty drawing. What’s with that? Our second meeting takes place at the gallery. The suggested framing reminds Max of his very dear Lillehammer -94 Magical Moments hockey card that is now worth 10 USD on eBay. Sam remembers the penalty shot by Peter Forsberg. If [a landscape beyond springtime] an inverted world were a matter of limited concern, would there be any need to suffer [fools] evil gladly? Katarina suggests that obscurity is an essentially neutral quality that can be added to artworks, like, say, yellow or comic. We offer Sam black coffee and a Snickers, both which he politely declines.