Egg Cream and Cigarettes
It was early May 2020, when I found this canvas in the alley behind our apartment in Mt. Pleasant. I don’t remember the exact date, but it was the same day they closed Gem Spa, a long-loved bodega in the East Village and maybe more importantly, the home of the Egg Cream. I randomly ended up at Gem Spa in 2008 during a trip to NYC. Just hung around all day. Watched the unfolding and collapsing of whatever, adding to the palimpsest of proof that we are all both pivotal and mundane. I had an Egg cream and ran out of cigarettes. A man brushed my shoulders off with a paper fan.
Egg Cream and Cigarettes is an ode to randomization, to turning your eyes into divining rods, to summoning the ideomotor.
It sweeps my floor clean when I become influenced by pattern or cleverness.
We have bored our eyes to death scrolling the rectangle.
May this re-tangle your eyes.