This afternoon I popped into Latitude to revisit Jfry Craig’s ‘dot.calm/49 Stories’. Gave me lots to think about in terms of the creation and evolution of work; the shaping of identity and narrative; forms of exhibition and many other recurring themes that have emerged for me through STEM Cell.

Jfry’s installation is both light and dense: whimsical and thoughtful in terms of textual pulls. Excerpts of dot.calm’s webscript documenting the life of obsessive, compulsive, golf loving, sous chef Paul (‘a troubled trouble maker of a gentleman who obviously had issues with language and relationships’) and his gradual retreat into himself are postered alongside dot.calm’s other work. TV monitors invite us to observe a seated figure visually quartered: one hand rests on a chair, the other grips a golf club, below, a foot in each monitor (shoes on each change frequently). Two small monitors sit akimbo on the floor, framing the larger ones. Mostly static on the right one, on the left I saw a bit of that cooking show with the woman whose husband left her for Tori Spelling. There was a shoebox with various mementos (a couple of match books, a ticket to SF MOMA, some photos of food---Paul’s creations?, a keychain and a tiny plastic woman). In the bathrooms are fuzzy pixel dot.calm dildo posters both beckoning and threatening: for the ladies, ‘Why aren’t you at home right now? Solutions to problems you know he won’t solve.’ And for the gents, ‘Do you measure up? Be nice ‘cause we sell sh*t that does.’ Courtesy of www.brandingbydot.calm On leaving the women’s bathroom, a glimpse in the mirror of the now non-reversed posters reminds you to ‘WASH YOUR HANDS’. A dot.calm poster reflecting Paul’s obsessive behaviour.

Among the sections of the webscript are ‘edited’ excerpts such as: ‘I stopped reading because it no longer captivated me…I generally distrust language…when they started selling ‘new-used’ vehicles, I understood that I didn’t quite understand. The truth is I lost track of language while I was mastering it.’

Reading Paul through dot.calm through Jfry is a bit dizzying. But like the Bridget Rileyesque ‘[Paul] numbers i’ image, its impact invites engagement rather than over analysis. Dot.calm’s body of work includes reverse text posters of ‘Get me drunk & then see what happens’, as well as tender reflections from Paul: ‘wanted. A quiet place where dad and I can skip rocks. A perfect round caught on tape to be remembered.’

I’m not sure if this installation fully realized Jfry’s aspirations for dot.calm/49 Stories (while I was at Latitude four strong arms appeared to repo the DVD decks. Jessica assured me that the decks would be replaced. I guess the royalties from www.brandingbydot.calm are still pouring in.) Somehow it felt like less like a work not still in progress, but one to be more fully inhabited. As a piece which began as webscript, evolved into installation and is now to be published as a book, dot.calm/49 Stories remains for the next week or so, a fitting finale to the experiment that was and continues to be STEM Cell.

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