Lately I have been looking at a lot of artwork made by veterans to excavate their trauma for a new job and I am visioning what they see more and more in my pure view. I wake up to the consistent one - it is of the horizon line usually at the base of a body of water. The sea so calm and the sun so high that it burns with a rageful peace and then often through the drawings one will notice a movement of the sun getting lower in wait of an imminent horror. Sometimes they draw the horror so psychedelic it almost seems fun like the first dip on the rollercoaster but secretly we know it is not that. For now, you are there in my view so high but shifts move my ability which alters the gaze. These moments become a reminder you will be further and further until only imagined soon, in memory and the imminent so mysterious in how bad it could actually be. We can pretend like nothing but know we are lying to the air in ourselves. A little white lie becomes a horror film so quickly like rot, like fear. It burns until it fades. I want to take back the pieces I knowingly broke off and in the past would say ‘I want to have them back’ but not this time because this time in the giving, I did not give over myself . Take them, they’re so yours. My heart is a plate and I want to give you food.
If it were always today, I would feel still like the sea in the mind of the veteran holding onto the calm they clung to out of fear of the unknown worst. The part when it gets hard. The part where nothing will ever be the same and you just get used to it. The slight buzz that never leaves of nothing that goes nowhere will return and I did not miss it. Sometimes I don’t want to go home. More ease in being away from the source but also amenable to the whatever happens next phenomena of being out in a world potentially determined to destroy you for no other reason than a rich person’s desire to have more blanketed in an ideology they don’t even mean but maybe you did once. Neither of us know what we are doing anymore but we keep waking and going. You wake for the boom, and bake in the sun. Once we were toddlers and then for the rest of time we are what happened to us. All spring, you told me the inevitable like a feedback loop on a broken machine and I just kept praying it would finally stop playing. Maybe we could throw it out. The sun has become so intense, I can only squint which narrows the horizon to a strobing of red as I wait for it to happen and wonder What if there is no explosion, what if there is only dust?
Cat Tyc is an interdisciplinary artist and writer whose work explores such questions as: Why do we relate the way that we do? What is explicit in the implicit? In dialogue with others and herself, her work explores these questions in text, video, performance and installation.
She has three chapbooks, An Architectural Seance (dancing girl press & studio), CONSUMES ME (Belladonna* Collaborative) and I AM BECAUSE MY LITTLE DOG KNOWS ME (Blush Lit) and a book of poetry, XO (The Ether Agency). Her most recent writing has been published in Maggot Brain, The Recluse, Shock of the Femme, Touch the Donkey, FENCE, Brooklyn Rail, American Museum of Paramusicology and the WITCH anthology by Dopamine Books.
She has presented and performed at the Microscope Gallery, Anthology Film Archives, Brooklyn Museum, Hauser & Wirth, Kassel Fest and the synthesis gallery in Berlin. She has directed music videos that have been added to the rotation on LOGO’s NewNowNext and MTVu. Her first solo exhibition, SIGNIFICANT OTHERNESS, was presented at Tanja Grunert gallery in 2022.
On WGXC/90.7 Wave Farm, she hosts MISSIVES TO THE ETHER where she interviews artists and writers about their relationship to creativity and spirit and then reads their tarot on air. She also has a Substack of the same name.
She has been granted residencies and fellowships at Signal Culture, The Flaherty Seminar, Spruceton Inn, and Mass MOCA and has received support from the Foundation of Contemporary Arts.
She lives in Hudson, NY and is currently studying to become a licensed
art therapist at the School of Visual Arts in NYC.
