The Sun is Always Rising, Steph Yates
Glovebox
Press, 2021
Following Yates’ multidisciplinary interests, the Preface of her chapbook outlines fourteen “spatio-sculptural … sites” that describe “spaces and objects, existing outside of time passing.” The individual sites resemble artworks bordered and curated like portraits hung in an exhibition. In each site, there are “no characters and no events,” but rather “pieces [that] embody the stillness and permanence of a photograph.” Like Keats’ “Ode on Grecian Urn,” we are asked by the Preface to imagine a site in which the stillness of a space or object could exist outside of time despite its mediation through a language grounded in absence.
To an extent, we observe such stillness in various sites Yates presents. We see an egg sliced on an angle in which the top half slides downward and is then “stopped forever” (Site i). We see an old “wooden ladder” that “never gets older” (Site ii). There are architectures that honeycomb into “endless rooms (Site iii) and a sunset that “just sits there in blazing stillness” (Site v), as on the cover of the chapbook and its title where the sun perpetually rises. We are even asked to imagine the “dirt-stench of continuous birth and continuous decay” (Site vi) in which scents are trapped by the perpetuity of a photograph. Yates' site invites us into a self-identical stillness in which “Today is today” (Site ix). Objects are sharpened by a geometric exactness in how they are staged. The self-certainty of how sites are presented replicate the intentional vision in curating objects for an exhibition. And, indeed, the launch of this chapbook was accompanied by a public exhibition hosted at the plumb in Toronto where sites from the chapbook, along with papier-mâché sculptures, were shown.
Despite the stillness of these sites, there is a formless negativity that constitutes their motionlessness. Such negativity is intimated on the cover of the chapbook itself. The cover contains an image of a geometric arc on the plane of a line: a sun resting on a horizon. Yet, the entire cover is yellow, as if to suggest that it is not the geometric line and arc that signify a sunset, but the intense yellow background on which the geometry is drawn. We intuit a sunset, not from the geometrical shape, but the yellowing negative space on which the geometrical shape is placed. The Preface compares the sculptural sites to the stillness of a photograph, but Yates' comparison is not just one that asks us to read the sites as static images of photography. Her comparison of sites to images, along with the title of the work, allude to Lisa Oppenheim’s The Sun is Always Setting Somewhere Else, an exhibition in which Oppenheim recontextualizes pictures of a setting sun taken by U.S. soldiers in Iraq. She prints these pictures, aligns them with sunsets in her native New York, and makes pictures of this recontextualization on 35mm slide film arranged in a slideshow. Just as Oppenheim’s exhibition questions universal spatial and temporal narratives through the recontextualization of images, so too does Yates offer a way in which we might question the Preface’s desire for a perfectly still linguistic site. Film photography itself does not merely present a still image, but grounds the positivity of an image through negative development. Light-sensitive silver halide crystals are exposed to light which creates an invisible image in an emulsion. This invisible image is then developed as a negative image in which the lightest portions of an image appear darkest and the darkest portions of an image appear lightest. Yates' comparison of her static sites to photography is interesting because photography itself is only able to produce a positive image through its development as an inverted negative image—a suggestion that her sites are also only able to present themselves as a stillness grounded by the condition of negativity. Photographs, too, are mediated by a surrounding negativity outside themselves. A photograph’s meaning is determined in large part by the pervading negativity that haunts the borders of a frame. Such negativity is invoked by interpretive questions of a photograph that extend beyond its frame: who made the photograph, when was the photograph made, what was left outside the frame and why, and to what extent was the subject in a photograph posed and directed a certain way?
Like the negativity that constitutes a positive still image, and Oppenheim’s exhibition that questions the universal and static perspective of images, Yates’ chapbook gradually invites us to question the possibility of reading her ‘sites’ beyond objects out of time. The Preface provides instructions on how the ‘sites’ of the book are to be read. It even mentions that the reader can rearrange the sentences in different “permutations” within each site, presumably without disrupting the stillness of the site. What is most intriguing about the Preface is the way in which it acts as an authoritative dictum outside the sites it tries to control yet is itself indistinct from the numbered sites it wishes to control. The Preface is organized as a curated sculptural object just like the proceeding numbered sites. When the Preface asks us to rearrange sentences within a site, I believe we are also asked to rearrange the Preface as one of many sites–to question the dictum of treating sites as motionless objects hung in an exhibition.
In the first few sites, we are presented with stationary objects that really do seem to exist out of time. Yet as we move through the later sites, details that are supposedly frozen fray into transient images. In Site iii we are presented with “stone slabs,” but the type of stone starts to blur as it “can look as though it is velvet, it is cotton, or it is wool,” akin to an underdeveloped photograph whose detail is lost in shadows. We never really know what stone is represented in the site as even the speaker cannot confirm its material. In other sites we get a description of a street lamp shining through the interior of a building, where the speaker notes that “It is as though the rectangle of light and the rectangular window were made for each other.” The speaker mirrors the reader in precariously interpreting the site that seems ambiguously wrought. Similarly, Site vii describes the speaker’s difficulty in determining whether “the structure looks down on the town, or the town looks up at the structure, or both, or neither,” to reflect our own uncertain questions that necessarily lead outside the site’s frame. In Site xiii, the speaker describes “Seven bubbles, full of a weightless liquid and ranging in diametre from one to three meters [that] cling to the ceiling.” The speaker further notes that “were someone to stand beneath them and look up, what they would see would surprise them.” This description does not tell us why or by what we would be surprised. The emotion we would experience, had we looked up at these bubbles, does not exist in the frame of the site but rather something we are invited to imagine outside the frame—a negativity that beckons us beyond the desire for self-identical stillness.
The slipperiness of Yates’ sites culminates in the last site where we are introduced to the myth that a “blue flower blooms a thousand years …” until it meets its mates’ pollen” (Site xiv). Because the speaker presents these details as a myth, we are never sure whether the descriptions of the flower are true or if they are mediated by an assumed myth whose uncertainty disavows the claims of myth. Instead, we are impelled, like the urn of crusty earth, to “remain, waiting” in determining the fulfillment of myth. Far from a still photograph out of time, the surrounding questions regarding the ambiguity of myth pull us out of the site–out of the frame that promises a linguistic object pressed in resin, untouched by time. Questions about the sites–questions that the sites cannot answer within their own atemporal stillness–serve as a negativity that exists beyond the sites’ sharp rectangular frame.
Even Yates' accompanying exhibition with the launch of her chapbook performs an amorphous negativity by reframing sites from her chapbook in a different context. Yates prints and displays individual sites from her chapbook, amongst a display of papier-mâché sculptures, for purposes beyond a desired stillness. Rather than the sites existing outside of time, they are temporally bound by their curational fluidity that spills from book to exhibition as part of their recontextualization in a multimedia exhibition. Even the title of the exhibition, The Sun Never Sets, indicates a new way of reading the sites with a trace of mourning. The chapbook title, The Sun is Always Setting, could suggest a pleasure in freezing a transitory state, in which objects never deteriorate and fade, and where plants breathe in perpetuity. However, the exhibition title, The Sun Never Sets, suggests a mourning in which objects are trapped in these transitional states–a state in which the blue flower forever waits to see if it will bloom after meeting its mate, or a state where plants will never grow because “to grow is to change” (Site viii) and they never do change in their uniform cyclical breathing. Yates' exhibition disrupts a reading of her sites as still photographs and instead (re)mediates them in and outside her chapbook.
The Sun is Always Rising asks us to be a composer, to perform permutations and substitutions where sentences and sites are rearranged in tracing a negativity–a temporality–that passes through each spatio-sculptural site. If the sites of this chapbook aspire to the medium of photography, we might think of them like sheets of film folding and creasing on a body of water. Each site asks us to read in them a negativity that questions and interrogates their certitude–to glimpse the possibility of these sites beyond stationary objects outside of time.
Adam Mohamed (he/him) is a Ph.D student in the English Literature department at the University of Western Ontario. His research concerns the ways in which nineteenth century British and German literature and philosophy overlap.