September 14, 2015
“Folded narratives look back to consider themselves, answer their own questions. A reader finds herself swiveling about at phrases whose consequence shifts and clarifies as the collection progresses. The book churns like a machine, its gears revealing their teeth only in shifting. What winds the stories together is a thematic suggestion that the pain of landscape can be experienced by those who haunt it – perhaps the reverse is true as well.”
“what is written here moves somewhere between a personal letter and a myth digested by generations. The stories are site-specific, witchy, and precise. They feature female protagonists who are geologists, dark matter physicists, and war heroes. Each tale is based on an “obscured site” the former human rights activist chose to study for its historic role in human or environmental suffering. “Place is time bending,” says Wikswo”
“Crows and surf breaking together, a bird between teeth. What is visual here is knotted in hair and earth and bone. Wikswo’s layered imagery seems digitally wrought, manipulated afterwards and stained with ink. But the images are in fact original photographs the artist produces using salvaged military equipment and government cameras, sometimes a century old. Wikswo learns the habits of each machine like an aching body. Her patient operations allow the artifacts to capture their own deterioration.”
The Diagram previously published my piece SIX NOTES ON THE HEADS OF DECAPITATED MEXICAN REVOLUTIONARIES. You can read it HERE.
