31 Days / The Self
by Samantha Wall / Amie Zimmerman
Amie Zimmerman tells us in her poem, The Self, which is accompanied by and faced with the metamorphic, gradient illustrations of Samantha Wall's 31 Days to create a collaborative excoriation of an identity of society's worst behaviors. In an effort to get at the root of true evil (i.e. violence, fascism, exploitation, colonization, etc.) both artist and poet peel away at the human inability to interact with society without (un)conscious integration. Zimmerman, whose poem meanders through both waking and dream states, assesses our current political turmoil, our fragile ecology, our sociopaths and demagogues who lead our country further into darkness, while also accounting for her own culpability. "Look at me/demanding anything," she states in a paradoxical gesture of power and abnegation. Opposite of Zimmerman's poem is Wall's series of fists created daily during the month of January 2017. In Wall's drawings, the self is also subject to forces beyond its control, accounting for an irresolute, perishing subjectivity while also maintaining a gesture of power, solidarity, and integrity. 31 Days/The Self reminds us that the way forward is not through attrition, not through the simplification of dualism, but through a radical recodification of our own identity that takes into account what we have yet to unpack, that our harms are not singular, solipsistic blips in the atmosphere, that our harms are systemic, that they are the harms of the many.
