https://jessbernhart.com Jess Bernhart Tue, 15 Apr 2025 03:40:53 +0000 https://jessbernhart.com en https://jessbernhart.com/Reading-1 Fri, 12 Jan 2024 23:50:04 +0000 Jess Bernhart https://jessbernhart.com/Reading-1 <img width="3024" height="4032" width_o="3024" height_o="4032" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/456cf36af085fba85f1be260775a14191daad7b60824b7228639a8fbf32c3cb6/IMG_3863.jpg" data-mid="202616071" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/456cf36af085fba85f1be260775a14191daad7b60824b7228639a8fbf32c3cb6/IMG_3863.jpg" /> READING&nbsp;︎︎︎ SO MUCH LONGING IN SO LITTLE SPACE (KNAUSGAARD) / BOY PARTS (CLARK)&nbsp; Jess Bernhart is a writer, curator and arts administrator. Currently managing rotating exhibits and special projects for ATL Airport Art, Bernhart also runs an&nbsp; artist publishing project, Volatile Parts, and an artist residency in Montezuma, GA,&nbsp; Volatile House. Bernhart co-curates fLoromancy, a (currently hibernating) arts publication. She has published essays, poetry, and arts criticism in Burnaway, ArtsATL, Eyedrum Periodically, Loose Change, ++, and has exhibited visual art in a handful of group shows. She holds a bachelor’s in philosophy from Haverford College and a master’s degree from the London School of Economics.&nbsp; &nbsp; <img width="3024" height="4032" width_o="3024" height_o="4032" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/356ea05f80937f79ca7350b0c2baa8a2f3dd2867792cf99504a31f5f9c4beae2/IMG_3867.jpg" data-mid="202616059" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/356ea05f80937f79ca7350b0c2baa8a2f3dd2867792cf99504a31f5f9c4beae2/IMG_3867.jpg" /> MANIFESTO.&nbsp;When I was in 9th grade, we read a particularly horrific story in English class. In it, a man and his dog get lost in a snow storm. To protect his skin from freezing, the man smears snot over his face, allowing each layer of mucus to freeze before applying another, creating a grotesque snot-mask to protect himself. The image is inescapable. Then the man kills his dog and wears him as a hat. Then the man dies. From all this brutality, the image of the snot-mask has stayed with me for decades, and when I thought of this project, the first image to come to mind was: snot-mask. Which is to say:&nbsp; it does not matter what I put here, it can be grotesque, my own disgusting effusion applied layer after layer for the sole purpose of protecting myself.&nbsp; And so to summarize (1) this can hold anything and (2) it serves me, not you. The value of the snot mask is obviously selfish. I hope that there is some value to you as reader, but it’s not really relevant. Why, if this is a selfish exercise, make it public at all? Why go to such pains to turn outward? The snot mask requires the snow storm to be of use.&nbsp; https://jessbernhart.com/Reading-2 Fri, 12 Jan 2024 23:50:04 +0000 Jess Bernhart https://jessbernhart.com/Reading-2 LISTENING ︎︎︎ Dragonfly in Amber, Diana Gabaldon; READING &nbsp;︎︎︎&nbsp;Boy Parts, Eliza Clark Jess Bernhart is a writer, curator and arts administrator. Currently managing rotating exhibits and special projects for ATL Airport Art, Bernhart also runs an artist publishing project, Volatile Parts, and an artist residency in Montezuma, GA,&nbsp; Volatile House. Bernhart co-curates fLoromancy, a (currently hibernating) arts publication. She has published essays, poetry, and arts criticism in Burnaway, ArtsATL, Eyedrum Periodically, Loose Change, ++, and has exhibited visual art in a handful of group shows, mostly in Atlanta. She holds a bachelor’s in philosophy from Haverford College and a master’s degree from the London School of Economics.&nbsp; <img width="3024" height="4032" width_o="3024" height_o="4032" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/1df91d4368a5972ea3c04307b3f6d1bd0b0fb3e7a301c3f32a663365bc62e01d/a-photo-evie-took.jpg" data-mid="203079187" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/1df91d4368a5972ea3c04307b3f6d1bd0b0fb3e7a301c3f32a663365bc62e01d/a-photo-evie-took.jpg" /><img width="3024" height="4032" width_o="3024" height_o="4032" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/74f68011421fe911e9d5c05420513466f14172d23da11e28d1ac171b1c62cb2d/camellia.jpg" data-mid="203079201" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/74f68011421fe911e9d5c05420513466f14172d23da11e28d1ac171b1c62cb2d/camellia.jpg" /> I think a lot about solitude because, with three small children, I have so little. Solitude is the fruit on the vine of loneliness; succulent aloneness.&nbsp; Out west, in hillier places, it is common to see little emergency ramps leading up from roads with long, enduring descents, so that if your brakes fail or your load is too heavy, you can steer yourself onto this little uphill escape route and coast to a stop. There are lots of them in Jordan, where I grew up, a country with radical changes in elevation (including the lowest place on Earth) and many vehicles with questionable drivers and bad brakes.&nbsp; I think about building such escape ramps into my own life, which often moves so briskly and relentlessly it’s like wearing roller skates on a slide. Where is, what is, the ramp? I read “to be lonely is to desire an absent want.” I have no idea what this means.&nbsp; I am alone in the car. I listen to a time travel romance novel that is 36 hours long, getting lost in it on my 2-hr commute. 4+ hours of solitude and driving past pecan groves, pulling into rural gas stations and shrinking down into my seat so that the other cars can’t see my breast pump, all vacuums and tubes, attached to me like an alien life force.&nbsp; Recent ideas: - book: Birds of Middle Georgia (illustrated) for children - phone booth listening stations // how to say goodbye - party with Pasquale at the house https://jessbernhart.com/Reading-9 Tue, 15 Apr 2025 03:40:53 +0000 Jess Bernhart https://jessbernhart.com/Reading-9 READING &nbsp;︎︎︎ E.M. Forster, A Passage to India Jess Bernhart is a writer, curator and arts administrator. Currently managing rotating exhibits and special projects for ATL Airport Art, Bernhart also runs an artist publishing project, Volatile Parts, and an artist residency in Montezuma, GA,&nbsp; Volatile House. Bernhart co-curates fLoromancy, a (currently hibernating) arts publication. She has published essays, poetry, and arts criticism in Burnaway, ArtsATL, Eyedrum Periodically, Loose Change, ++, and has exhibited visual art in a handful of group shows, mostly in Atlanta. She holds a bachelor’s in philosophy from Haverford College and a master’s degree from the London School of Economics.&nbsp; There’s a wind chime on the neighbor’s porch — one of those standard models with hollow tubes and a wooden striker, the kind you find next to the seed packets at the hardware store, the kind that assumes its own neutrality. It’s easy to ignore. It blends in with the edge of things: the porch post, the hanging fern. And yet it insists, subtly, on a certain relationship to the world — a responsiveness structured by waiting. It only makes sound in response to contact. That feels important. It does not initiate, but neither is it inert. The wind chime is a passive object until touched by something external — invisible, environmental — at which point it transforms, briefly, into sound.&nbsp; It exists only partially. For long stretches, it is suspended, mute. Then, for a moment: sound. Then silence again. This rhythm — absence, interruption, resonance, absence — mirrors a rhythm I recognize in both motherhood and creative practice. The wind chime models a kind of receptivity that’s rarely celebrated in a culture that prefers output, control, self-starting. But here is a form that does none of those things. It’s not an instrument one plays. It’s an instrument that allows itself to be played by the weather. And maybe there’s something valuable in that — in a form that does not resist transience, that is shaped entirely by contact, and that understands its purpose as something temporary, ephemeral, and contingent.I think of Duchamp’s Unhappy Readymade, a geometry textbook hung outside in the elements for an extended period of time in 1910, in Buenos Aires. Perhaps the windchime is a subtle piece of conceptual art, smuggled into households as musical instrument, an artwork in disguise. There’s also something architectural in it — a system of hollow parts, suspended, designed not for use but for possibility. A structure that makes no claim to permanence, but does insist on design. The wind chime is not chaos. It’s an ordered possibility. And the sound it makes is less a performance than a document: evidence of atmosphere. This is not a grand metaphor. It’s just an object I keep passing and noticing — how it holds silence, how it responds, how it sounds and stops and sounds again. And how, like many structures I admire, it is defined not by what it produces, but by what it allows. <img width="287" height="434" width_o="287" height_o="434" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/64a07f3eb3cc9aea8f947af82304e1788e0e421827c8148bc2de123ef97497eb/unhappy.valise.jpg" data-mid="229893200" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/287/i/64a07f3eb3cc9aea8f947af82304e1788e0e421827c8148bc2de123ef97497eb/unhappy.valise.jpg" /> Unhappy Readymade (box in a valise version)https://www.toutfait.com/unmaking_the_museum/Unhappy%20Readymade.html︎︎︎ https://jessbernhart.com/Reading-5 Sun, 13 Apr 2025 03:12:02 +0000 Jess Bernhart https://jessbernhart.com/Reading-5 LISTENING ︎︎︎ Lottie Hazell, Piglet Jess Bernhart is a writer, curator and arts administrator. Currently managing rotating exhibits and special projects for ATL Airport Art, Bernhart also runs an artist publishing project, Volatile Parts, and an artist residency in Montezuma, GA,&nbsp; Volatile House. Bernhart co-curates fLoromancy, a (currently hibernating) arts publication. She has published essays, poetry, and arts criticism in Burnaway, ArtsATL, Eyedrum Periodically, Loose Change, ++, and has exhibited visual art in a handful of group shows, mostly in Atlanta. She holds a bachelor’s in philosophy from Haverford College and a master’s degree from the London School of Economics. She has three children, a husband, and a dog, and lives in Montezuma, GA. <img width="3024" height="4032" width_o="3024" height_o="4032" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/c1dc2acbbfb174dcfe176aafbf96f75905bf2996df554ff1cdb2a10eeb9081d1/IMG_4320.jpg" data-mid="229727758" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/c1dc2acbbfb174dcfe176aafbf96f75905bf2996df554ff1cdb2a10eeb9081d1/IMG_4320.jpg" /><img width="3024" height="4032" width_o="3024" height_o="4032" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/b284ab8e1f504a13aae3cb3707ab773d0fe12d0257ef37497e7d221d8fb16e6b/IMG_4297.jpg" data-mid="229727768" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/b284ab8e1f504a13aae3cb3707ab773d0fe12d0257ef37497e7d221d8fb16e6b/IMG_4297.jpg" /><img width="1170" height="2059" width_o="1170" height_o="2059" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/83dc62c3c6832be3e05fc64d3b38b6d00f721be30e106f1278ded0f6d8e3592f/IMG_4330.jpg" data-mid="229727769" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/83dc62c3c6832be3e05fc64d3b38b6d00f721be30e106f1278ded0f6d8e3592f/IMG_4330.jpg" /> We released the butterflies on Saturday. They came out one at a time, pausing just long enough to build suspense before each took off. There was no signal — no flourish — just the sudden explosive departure as they made their break for it. We were all gathered around the little mesh tent, yelling goodbye, laughing, shrieking. The boys were cackling, for reasons known only to them. Maybe the movement. Maybe the noise. Maybe just the shared electricity of it all. The butterflies had been with us for ten days. Long enough to feel familiar. Long enough to ignore, and then remember. We fed them sugar water on cotton balls. We named them. Then we let them go. What strikes me is how little time it took — their whole life, neatly contained in the same week that we ran out of dish soap, when Laith started saying “up,” when I did some laundry and didn’t fold it. Meanwhile, I am still in the middle of everything. Still changing diapers. Still trying to figure out how to explain anything at all. Watching their full metamorphosis felt almost rude. Like time was showing off. I remembered something I read once — that caterpillars don’t just grow wings. They liquefy. They turn into a nutrient-rich soup inside the chrysalis. The self becomes sludge before it becomes the self again. That’s what becoming means. Not wings, but forgetting. Earlier that same day, before the butterflies were released, I was wandering the neighborhood with the kids. No destination, no agenda. I had the passing thought — not even a sad one — that I was just running down the clock. Filling the space between breakfast and nap. Moving my body and theirs through the hours because there was nothing else to do. But under that, or maybe alongside it, was another thought: all we have is time. Without it, there is no experience, no meaning, no self to speak of. I will never have this day again. This walk. This particular configuration of light and leaves and snack requests. Aiden was chewing an apple core. Evie was singing to herself, insisting on holding my hand. We were just… in it. The philosopher Henri Bergson wrote that real time isn’t clock time. It isn’t measured in minutes or hours, but in duration — a continuous flow of experience, shaped by how we attend to it. Time, in this sense, stretches or contracts depending on our presence within it. That idea resonates. Parenting small children is, above all, an act of attention. The tasks repeat, but the moments don't. You’re tuned to the micro-frequency of needs and moods, of little shifts that make no narrative sense but shape the day completely. It looks like nothing is happening. But you’re deep inside it. That is why the days feel so full. And maybe that’s why the butterfly experience felt full, too. It arrived with its own tempo — slower than ours, but more legible. It gave the house a shape. Not one divided by meals or Blippi episodes, but one that moved in quiet stages. Stillness. Goo. Becoming. Gone. And maybe that was the real gift — not transformation as metaphor, but transformation as rhythm. A small beat inside the large, loose song of parenting. A reminder that some things really do begin and end. That not everything repeats forever. That something can happen, completely, and still be small. We left the mesh tent on the porch for a few days afterward. Not as a shrine, exactly. Just because no one took it in. https://jessbernhart.com/Reading-3 Fri, 12 Jan 2024 23:50:04 +0000 Jess Bernhart https://jessbernhart.com/Reading-3 READING 3 ︎︎︎ Sarah J. Maas, A Court of Thorns and Roses series skip skip skip skip skip <img width="2162" height="3000" width_o="2162" height_o="3000" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/e68f8fef3cd030e4019b9b9629e6909fb15125acc87aeedb4e2fa8c3a263713a/Professor-Georgette-Theyskens.jpg" data-mid="201599317" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/e68f8fef3cd030e4019b9b9629e6909fb15125acc87aeedb4e2fa8c3a263713a/Professor-Georgette-Theyskens.jpg" /> POWER FANTASIES Fantasy has long been dismissed as escapism—dragons and love triangles, lush worldbuilding for its own sake. But the best fantasy isn’t about escape. It’s about systems. And more importantly, it’s about making systems visible. In the real world, power often hides in plain sight. Forever-lover-boy Michel Foucault argued that modern power works not through spectacle or domination, but through arrangement. Architecture. Discipline. It moves quietly, organizing who we can be, what we can desire, how we live without realizing we’re being shaped. By the time we notice it, we’ve already internalized it (”disciplined bodies”). There’s no need for a king when we’ve all become our own jailers (the panopticon). Fantasy, paradoxically, offers clarity. In a well-built fantasy world, the rules are not hidden—they’re named, ritualized, aestheticized. Magic has laws. Courts have hierarchies. Love has contracts. You know who is powerful and why. And that knowledge isn’t just background; it becomes a site of struggle. The protagonist might not be able to break the system, but they can see it. They can strategize. They can subvert. Donna Haraway, writing from a different discipline entirely, might call this an “ecology of meaning”—a system in which everything, from rituals to relationships, is entangled. Meaning doesn’t come from individuals alone, but from the network of forces that shape them: biology, culture, myth, gender, technology. A fantasy world like Sarah J. Maas’s A Court of Thorns and Roses (which cloaks its ideological labor in romance and velvet) is full of these entanglements. The courts are not just settings. They’re machines for sorting power, kinship, beauty, and violence. Even desire—the engine of so much fantasy—isn’t exempt. What characters want, who they choose, how they touch—it’s all shaped by the systems they inhabit. Ursula K. Le Guin understood this deeply. In her speculative worlds, the question is never simply “What is freedom?” but “What does freedom mean when the rules are embedded in your body, your language, your gods?” Fantasy offers a strange kind of honesty. It doesn’t pretend that anything is possible. It asks, instead: What if the structure was knowable? What if you could trace the shape of the net that’s holding you? What would you do then? The pleasure of reading fantasy isn’t in the escape. It’s in the moment of recognition—when the system reveals itself, and a character begins to test its boundaries. When power becomes legible. When rules can be negotiated, not just obeyed. It’s no coincidence that series like A Court of Thorns and Roses, Fourth Wing, and other entries in the so-called “romantasy” genre are exploding in popularity at a moment of widespread disenchantment. Political faith is eroding. Institutions are unraveling. The rules that govern our world feel increasingly opaque—designed elsewhere, enforced everywhere, and impervious to influence. In response, readers are turning to stories where power is dramatic, visible, and personal. Where authority can be confronted directly, even seduced.&nbsp; These novels offer more than escapism. They offer the fantasy of coherence. Of cause and effect. Of knowing what forces are shaping your life—and the thrill of watching someone push back. And for a generation coming of age in a world where the rules feel both invisible and inescapable, that might be the most seductive fantasy of all. https://jessbernhart.com/Action-6 Sun, 13 Apr 2025 03:57:44 +0000 Jess Bernhart https://jessbernhart.com/Action-6 Action 6 ︎︎︎ Ryoji Ikeda’s data-verse at the High Museum of Art send me an email&nbsp; <img width="275" height="183" width_o="275" height_o="183" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/4147bd3a63fc09687fd1d2040ffdb31d4059394efa0f4928df821bd09fc63aac/dataverse.jpeg" data-mid="229781143" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/275/i/4147bd3a63fc09687fd1d2040ffdb31d4059394efa0f4928df821bd09fc63aac/dataverse.jpeg" /> On Ryoji Ikeda’s data-verse There is a particular kind of awe that emerges in the presence of the incomprehensible. Not the mystery of myth or metaphor, but the sublime of hard data — vast, clinical, absolute. Ryoji Ikeda’s data-verse, currently on view at the High Museum, traffics in this form of awe. It is an art of overload: sight, sound, scale. A deluge of information rendered into aesthetic form. Ikeda translates quantum theory and cosmic mapping into pulsating grids, pixel flares, and staccato bursts of white noise. The effect is often too much. Visitors speak of dizziness, of disorientation, of being unable to stay in the room for long. Even museum docents, tasked with sitting among the work, have reportedly struggled to endure its sensory onslaught. But this discomfort is not incidental. It is the work. data-verse does not invite contemplation so much as it enacts a failure of comprehension. It overwhelms — not sentimentally, but structurally. It reveals the gap between our evolved, flesh-bound perceptual system and the systems that now define our world: computational, cosmic, informational. What we encounter is not just data, but the scale of data. The universe, made electric. In this way, Ikeda’s work is not unlike the actual universe. That is: the universe we know exists, mathematically, scientifically, but can never feel. The one in which stars spin off neutrinos we’ll never detect, in which ninety-five percent of matter is dark, in which time is responsive to mass, in which the multiverse is not metaphor but theoretical prediction. We live inside this — and cannot sense it. Ikeda gives that unfeeling a form. The soft metaphysics of earlier sublime traditions still accommodated the human — it held a place for us, even as it gestured toward vastness. It’s the sublime with a bench, so to speak. It lets us stay in the room. Think of Caspar David Friedrich’s monk in the fog, or Rothko’s radiant voids: these are landscapes of enormity, yes, but also of presence. The viewer is not erased but situated — small, perhaps, but spiritually legible. These works offer emotional legibility, a kind of reverent melancholy. You are still the subject, still allowed to feel something about your own smallness. Ikeda’s sublime is different. It is clinical. It is coded. There is no figure in the landscape, no narrative arc, no human scale to cling to. Just the system, pulsing, impersonal. Just the universe, stripped of metaphor, rendered in sound and light. And yet: it is beautiful. Or at least, it is overwhelming in a beautiful way. Which is to say — it demands reverence. Not for what we understand, but for what we never will. This is the strange gift of Ikeda’s work: not a translation of data into feeling, but a staging of their mutual irreconcilability. It doesn’t make the universe graspable. It doesn’t domesticate the machine. Instead, it offers a place to sit — however briefly — inside that vast tension. To let the system pass through us, loud and bright and unintelligible.I notice that even in the promotional images for data-verse, a human figure is always present — dwarfed by light, standing at the edge of the system. It’s a familiar composition, echoing&nbsp; Friedrich’s monk. The impulse is clear: we need scale, and the museum’s marketing department delivered it. We need a body in the frame to make the incomprehensible feel legible. In doing so, we agree to soften Ikeda’s clinical sublime, turning it back into something romantic — something we can feel about. Even in a system designed to exceed us, we insert ourselves, because that’s what we’ve always done. <img width="1024" height="654" width_o="1024" height_o="654" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/af8ac9147a6a53a15ea5310da9250baadd4108c33cae27f3b99e97b1fae4794a/Ryoji-Ikeda_HIROSAKI-MOCA-09_Photo-Takeshi-Asano-1024x654.jpg" data-mid="229727811" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/af8ac9147a6a53a15ea5310da9250baadd4108c33cae27f3b99e97b1fae4794a/Ryoji-Ikeda_HIROSAKI-MOCA-09_Photo-Takeshi-Asano-1024x654.jpg" /> <img width="900" height="600" width_o="900" height_o="600" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/bf69a11e1260bdbe3eaa86b4a960f94939245277f48c625a3d91bb6025a4832e/monk-on-theseeefull.jpg" data-mid="229727819" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/900/i/bf69a11e1260bdbe3eaa86b4a960f94939245277f48c625a3d91bb6025a4832e/monk-on-theseeefull.jpg" /> https://jessbernhart.com/Reading-8 Tue, 15 Apr 2025 02:32:11 +0000 Jess Bernhart https://jessbernhart.com/Reading-8 Reading ︎︎︎ Percival Everett, James mending the blanket, I learned to touch my son’s name, the shape of his sleep. I recently shredded Aiden’s baby blanket in the wheels of the stroller. A gutting moment — not because the blanket was precious in any obvious way, but because it was his. A gift, embroidered with his name. And as one of twins, second- and third-born, there are so few things that belong uniquely to him. Everything is a hand-me-down. Everything is shared. The blanket felt like a small claim — a minor stake in personhood. So when the stroller’s wheels chewed it apart, it felt like a metaphor I wasn’t ready for. I decided to repair it. I didn’t hide the damage, largely because I lack the skill. I patched the holes with an old washcloth and stitched three dark blue stars into the soft, tan chenille. A visible mending. A kind of declaration: this was worth saving. My daughter, Evie, helped. She is delighted, generally, by breaking and mending, and when we finished, she insisted on presenting it to Aiden like a gift. And it was one. The repaired blanket has more presence than it did before. It has history now. Evidence of love and ruin and care. Textiles invite this kind of meaning-making. They are the objects that live closest to us — on our skin, in our beds, underfoot. They bear witness. And unlike almost any other ephemera, cloth remembers without needing to be archived. It creases. It stains. It holds the body’s residue. The philosopher Sara Ahmed writes that emotions leave impressions — perhaps textiles are the most impressionable things we have. They absorb our dailiness, our mistakes, our midday snacks. It is emotionally obvious that we should hold on to the perfumed shirts of ex-lovers, the flimsy newborn hats distributed at hospitals, a grandparent’s favorite throw pillow.&nbsp; Richard Sennett writes that repair “is a way of making the broken whole again,” but also that it “reveals the qualities of the object.” What I discovered as I stitched those stars was not just the texture of chenille, but the texture of my own longing — to hold onto time, to recognize my son, to protect something small and soft and his. <img width="3024" height="4032" width_o="3024" height_o="4032" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/e2c5b64db376a9a6b6ed748606cd25bec7c22753112e508dee3faa0e5ccde115/IMG_E6003028-E487-4D1C-90EB-962090CA5685.JPEG" data-mid="229798033" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/e2c5b64db376a9a6b6ed748606cd25bec7c22753112e508dee3faa0e5ccde115/IMG_E6003028-E487-4D1C-90EB-962090CA5685.JPEG" /> https://jessbernhart.com/Portfolio-7 Mon, 14 Apr 2025 14:33:05 +0000 Jess Bernhart https://jessbernhart.com/Portfolio-7 Portfolio 7 ︎︎︎ When I look and you look back&nbsp; send me an email&nbsp; <img width="3300" height="2550" width_o="3300" height_o="2550" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/c9fb04351eb0b8b13f39e9dc1559db2abc4b15340a1e23595cd9260f1d57b162/Trans-Mall-2024-write-up_1.jpg" data-mid="229771098" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/c9fb04351eb0b8b13f39e9dc1559db2abc4b15340a1e23595cd9260f1d57b162/Trans-Mall-2024-write-up_1.jpg" /> <img width="6600" height="2550" width_o="6600" height_o="2550" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/9a2f97020c4e2707a89b96c01c348c55aaced968f7bc03d4a61d77c430ca6227/Trans-Mall-2024-write-up_2.jpg" data-mid="229771103" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/9a2f97020c4e2707a89b96c01c348c55aaced968f7bc03d4a61d77c430ca6227/Trans-Mall-2024-write-up_2.jpg" /> <img width="6600" height="2550" width_o="6600" height_o="2550" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/418058d449aa4d16bd7fc1e71755acabd2711f9ce05db6ffa9cbb33f01b24e6c/Trans-Mall-2024-write-up_3.jpg" data-mid="229771102" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/418058d449aa4d16bd7fc1e71755acabd2711f9ce05db6ffa9cbb33f01b24e6c/Trans-Mall-2024-write-up_3.jpg" /> <img width="6600" height="2550" width_o="6600" height_o="2550" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/f2a289d0204f3cb2640e297912ef3e5fef3ae25fc56f2aff3a5065be8e610e71/Trans-Mall-2024-write-up_4.jpg" data-mid="229771101" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/f2a289d0204f3cb2640e297912ef3e5fef3ae25fc56f2aff3a5065be8e610e71/Trans-Mall-2024-write-up_4.jpg" /> <img width="6600" height="2550" width_o="6600" height_o="2550" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/f0ac572233f84c3044afd8165d21f58bcd3a1dec686cfc3151324f10244f7f28/Trans-Mall-2024-write-up_5.jpg" data-mid="229771100" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/f0ac572233f84c3044afd8165d21f58bcd3a1dec686cfc3151324f10244f7f28/Trans-Mall-2024-write-up_5.jpg" /> <img width="6600" height="2550" width_o="6600" height_o="2550" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/8cb9f5a1ba1eda0b3227ee17204a4d5331c33ade05575ffb35ac18145e835a7a/Trans-Mall-2024-write-up_6.jpg" data-mid="229771099" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/8cb9f5a1ba1eda0b3227ee17204a4d5331c33ade05575ffb35ac18145e835a7a/Trans-Mall-2024-write-up_6.jpg" /> When I look and you look back includes contemporary photography by Kendall Bessent, Jose Ibarra Rizo, Peyton Fulford, and Talecia Tucker. Installed November 2024 - November 2025, ATL Transportation Mall. 96 images. Graphic Design by Maggie Weidner. Printing and Installation by The Color Spot. Exhibit photos by Mike Jensen.&nbsp; https://jessbernhart.com/Reading-4-actual Sat, 12 Apr 2025 16:49:11 +0000 Jess Bernhart https://jessbernhart.com/Reading-4-actual READING 4︎︎︎ Andrew Lipstein, Something Rotten Mambas do not believe in the accidental There are three stacks in a standard pack of Mambas. Each flavor lives in its own neat column, wrapped and subdivided, like small scrolls of candy sealed for later reading. I ate a yellow, then another, then a third—at first thinking it was strange, charmed by the repetition. As though the world, in a minor act of alignment, had given me a winning hand. But of course, it was no coincidence. Mambas are sorted. What seemed like good fortune was only confusion. Mambas are not like other candies—Skittles or jelly beans—that tumble together in a single democracy of color. Those are designed for the dip and draw, that little rush of luck. I reach in hoping for purple and get orange instead. A system of chance, or at least the appearance of it. But Mambas resist this. They do not mingle. Each flavor remains intact, sealed off. If you want variety, you must create it yourself. Open all three inner wrappings, dig through the waxy layers, redistribute by hand. It becomes a kind of labor, this pursuit of difference. A small act of re-sorting, just to make things feel a little more alive. What pleasure is denied in these structures? Or perhaps: what anxiety is soothed? I think, for no particular reason, of how some streaming platforms have returned to releasing episodes once a week. A return to pacing. The refusal of excess. One episode, like one yellow, then another. Epicurus, who knew something about desire, suggested that pleasure is not found in abundance but in the absence of pain. But one wonders if he ever tried to open a Mambas pack with one hand while pushing a stroller uphill. Even the mildest hunger becomes philosophical when there are wrappers involved. Georges Bataille wrote of pleasure as “an expenditure,” an excess that resists containment—not something to be managed or meted out, but something that burns itself up in the moment, wasteful, radiant, unrepeatable. But here, even indulgence is folded into order. The candy stack, the viewing queue—little pleasures engineered to behave. Mambas do not believe in the accidental. And yet some part of us still hopes—for what? A green, maybe. A wild card. <img width="1200" height="696" width_o="1200" height_o="696" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/aee7163b853e5c2637f8744d4cafa822e7cab468e3bad8bdc476e473b084071a/Screenshot-2025-04-14-at-11.51.24PM.png" data-mid="229798318" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/aee7163b853e5c2637f8744d4cafa822e7cab468e3bad8bdc476e473b084071a/Screenshot-2025-04-14-at-11.51.24PM.png" /><img width="958" height="616" width_o="958" height_o="616" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/76555e2630d6eec6024c822182433753cfbcf6ba3c434e40696ed1871736e64b/Screenshot-2025-04-14-at-11.51.10PM.png" data-mid="229798319" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/958/i/76555e2630d6eec6024c822182433753cfbcf6ba3c434e40696ed1871736e64b/Screenshot-2025-04-14-at-11.51.10PM.png" /><img width="1268" height="522" width_o="1268" height_o="522" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/f2d6908266cf74011f44c161905750bc0517e41f5006ecb8692dbdd8b55b6314/Screenshot-2025-04-14-at-11.50.00PM.png" data-mid="229798314" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/f2d6908266cf74011f44c161905750bc0517e41f5006ecb8692dbdd8b55b6314/Screenshot-2025-04-14-at-11.50.00PM.png" />