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their production abruptly stopped and the drawings were put into storage, not to be rediscovered until the 1930s. It seems likely that some were destroyed. In this piece, on the recto side, lines drawn by ruler, sunor flower-like drawings, and a combination of English and asemic writing fill a classically Shaker symmetrical arrangement of circles and semi-circles probably drawn by compass. On both recto and verso, the characters progress from legible to abstract to highly ornamented and back again, dissolving or exploding into clouds of dots, flowers arranged into sentences, groupings of lines that traverse the nested semi-circles: a communication of the transmutability of literal and abstract meaning and of the possibility of otherworldly information penetrating to this material plane. —EDB 1
Martha Ellen Stortz, “From Bodies to Brooms: Resistance to Routinization in the Shaker Era of Manifestations,” Journal of Ritual Studies 12, no. 1 (Summer 1998): 9–16.
Bernadette Van-Huy b. Queens, New York
In Bernadette Van-Huy’s Home Improvements (2019) an off-kilter letter “O,” like one might find in storefront signage, floats in from the bottom edge and converges with large, planetary spheres [PL. 21]. Within this suspended environment, small musical notes appear stranded from the musical staff or located high above it; one cluster of notes bends at an angle, suggesting a dangling mobile or model of a solar system. The drawing evokes both exponential depth and an airy, distant headspace. This enigmatic thought-world is echoed in Spinning with Spinoza (2019), in which we see a pile of sandbags that are turned upright and seem to hop or twirl [PL. 22]. These simple means of weighing things down are here given balletic lightness and animism. On the sides of four of these bags appears some more musical notes, within which the existential question “WHAT’S MY WORTH?” is spelled out. Both drawings were part of Van-Huy’s 2019 exhibition at Svetlana Gallery in New York, during which actual sandbags were placed around the gallery floor and prints on Plexiglas sheets recounted fragments of a fictional character’s inner dialogue. In these works and in her other projects, Van-Huy tends to inhabit
