Playing Possum

Jamila Abdul-Sabur

So one day a possum fell through the ceiling. The possum crashing through… it was as if it entered the space from some mythical realm… reassembling the strangeness of memories—the power to deal with something as one pleases: creating tasks—becoming rituals— determination of events—to control oneself—becoming spirit—the moving rearrangement of objects—shifting from one place to another. Do the objects exist in or move through a temporal domain?

The surrealists were not interested in likeness. Rene Magritte and Dali’s figures all looked the same. The figures are stand-ins one can project onto; there’s nothing specific, and you can imagine your own face occupying their figures. You can’t look at an Alice Neel portrait and see yourself but you can see yourself in one of Giorgio de Chirico’s dummies. They shift and change. In a dream or daydream your face disappears, you become an agent of the created environments. The figure can be a flat archetypal statuary entity you can move in and out of; whereas a character is more nuanced, identifiable by specific traits. An agent is a type of being that can be a sort of conduit that transfers energies in a space.

Jamilah Abdul-Sabur is interested in disfluency and the dislocation of cognition—how language breaks down through memory. She received her BFA in interdisciplinary sculpture from the Maryland Institute College of Art and is currently an MFA candidate in the UCSD Visual Arts Department.