Nine Poems by Gabriella Andino, Nine Paintings by Tori Tinsley

Tori Tinsley, Hug Gone Riding, Acrylic on canvas, 24" x 24", 2016

Curated by CC Calloway

 

 

 

 

 

Tori Tinsley, Gotta Climb That Mountain, Acrylic on panel, 56” x 48”, 2020

 

 

 

 

 

 

Gabriella Andino

 

 

 

 

 

I’m flailing for peace allocating pieces of past autonomy

 

 

He without name flesh risen spinning in place

chocolate from ceiling reformation daunting

each planet i have yet to visit boil me last vision I am not tempted to miss him

Still, an island forms black sand keeps the shore

I am disgusted by this shit I’ve found at our front door

A week in Singapore and then many weeks More

I do not miss you

As i did before

I will explode soon

 

Facts fucks friendship

Fast done estrangement

 

Dig your toes into my skin

Let the cold permeate within

 

A witch

Never mother nor woman

Salt circles and them

 

Press me toward premonition

I felt love twice enough

I bench time

         altar boy bending low

Kneading whore

Needing more

Never from man but from the core

 

Arrest this poem

I’m stealing more

 

 

 

 

Tori Tinsley, Picnic Hug, Acrylic on canvas, 24″ x 24″, 2016

 

 

 

 

 

Pity cheats on Terror

 

 

Ultimately I am too sad to create

Van Gogh minus the compulsion to create

And it’s here where the trees are asleep too

I have missed everything I thought I deserved, for too long

And now I grieve loss, because there is nothing else to hold on to

 

I said, “my world is right beyond the tree line, right past this lagoon”.

They stared at me while eating philly cheese steaks at the sandbar.

I guess it makes more sense to be here, with my terrifying Uber driver, my

terrifying job, my terror.

 

My terror in the unhung picture frames, in the N as in Nancy, in the coughing and

the sneezing in the room of no windows in the screen monitoring in the sense of

urgency I never wanted in the 12 tribes of Israel in the Starbucks and Chick-fil-a

boycotts, my terror.

 

And the Joy.

To know you’re out there. To hear you, feel you, away.

I feel you and I’m still here, today, in my terror. Do you feel my joy? Or are you in

terror too?

In what happened to me; what happened to me? What happened to me without

you?

 

I try to be understood, in my double hours, the secrets in my screens, but I’m

surveyed, surveyed, surveyed.

 

Maybe it’s the call of the void that reminds me I’m alive.

 

 

 

 

 

Tori Tinsley, Under Glass, Acrylic on panel, 24” x 24”, 2020

 

 

 

 

 

My Box

 

 

I know it’s hard to open up. I’m not having trouble saying words that explain the thing but the thing is a box that encases the feeling which is what I’m stumbling trying to find the key to. My box is wearing a blazer with the tag still on to the bar at night. My box is turning the flea market to find a sign on US 78. My box is a board game half finished and pushed into a corner. My box is a lime kept by my salt lamp to balance the boredom. My box is seven pillows to squish my hollow body. My box is a twenty dollar bag of cat food because she deserves better than me. My box is one earring because I won’t lose two. My box is desperate interviews. My box is not what I’m willing to do. My box is the echo of a metaphor for another me. My box separates me from love, love that is happening for me. The feeling in the box is the realization I don’t quite remember. The feeling in the box is how I feel when I talk to Stuart. The feeling in the box is falling onto a bed with Lorenzo in Morocco. The feeling in the box is catching a 5 and moving. The feeling in the box is Warschauer Bruecke and knowing loneliness is imminent but not crying because the world is your crib. The feeling I want to share when I’m with you. The end of May and beginning of June.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Tori Tinsley, The Valley So Low, Acrylic on panel, 64 x 48 in, 2018

 

 

 

 

 

Dragging your imagination like a curtain

 

 

It’s so hard to try to experience anything objectively. There’s this insistent paranoia that makes you believe – in spite of your disbelief in the whole ordeal – that you are being played, conned, and manipulated by the institution and other people’s decisions. The excess equal to the display and the excess of the display is what touches me, and the art becomes the portal. To which it was not that for me before, before it was an experience. The objectivity of the art itself, is penetrating my body And so I don’t know if I feel sorry for, or jealous of, the aura preserved forever. The only thing that can only be felt, but never touched.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Chiron

 

 

There is no decline

In my love, throughout surges of pain.

After all, a body

Can not fully exist in 360 vision.

 

If sights do control

If minds only see

I wish you not a responsibility to feel me.

 

But if attention is paired with pain

And your finger in my wound could

Point to where it hurts. I’d agree;

I’m not broken, I’m alive.

 

Feigning Feigning Feigning Feigning Intimacy

You are more than what I touch

As is this desire

Stronger than what hurts.

 

A body in pain is exposing stone

I bear my fruit, I need not be replanted.

But should illness inflict upon my roots and

Tremors do appear

Save what is good

Begin again to tend to what is bound to grow

And perform rites upon that which hath

Lost so instead.

 

For the tree in me a seed I’ll be.

Not stricken so yet by the sun

Rather soaking in the moistness

Of a thousand deaths a thousand lives

Focused, not to hypnotize, but to wait

In the patient arms of a hunger that knows

It is not the body that is its bait.

 

 

 

Tori Tinsley, Nighttime Hug, Acrylic on fabric, stuffed with batting, 36″ x 48″, 2016

 

 

 

 

 

 

Petrichor.

 

 

I wander, thru my window

Along the ripped edge of civility

I test my humanity before I trespass

                                  Barefoot.

In quest of, this chemical comedy:

A REACTION – ON CONTACT

The Scent of the Memory of Death

Of course, the asphalt and lime simmers

And I smell not the Earth, but a cunning

                                    Which cures me.

 

We breathe in this feeling made of air

And the glory of a mid-June downpour

          And I

 .        Listen

To the sensual echo of the Earth curling in.

 

What dictates the mass of a raindrop?

Its speed and weight

Or how beautiful it seems to me

On any given day.

 

 

 

 

 

Tori Tinsley, Hopeful Hug, 2017, Acrylic on panel, 8” x 6”

 

 

 

 

 

 

[untitled]

 

 

It takes a day to memorialize a building

Takes a year to pave a road

Picture in a second

Forever to be sold

Eternity of imagination

A lifetime never seen.

Wisdom is timely

The symptoms pass before you believe.

 

The golden filibuster’s trajectory laments patented ideas

Inescapable daily repeated virtual mood awards

Founders validate elections and the list goes unseen.

Names of men we all possess.

Nonchalance as power

What omnipotent authority have you provided detached from the numbers?

 

When I’m not doing my laundry

I’m waiting for the days to grow into a nest of familiar wonder

There are textures received in the untanglement

Polka dots clinging to the fabric of warmer ones

I let all the private things get too close

To what I always touch

Weak buttons

Pieces hand-washed

I prefer not to keep watch

As my value doubles up

 

And the list goes on and on

We the People who I let evade my belief in myself

The little devils I hire to tempt my pious ass

With sexual awakening and dual citizenship

Loads of it

I’m talking about real Gold here, people

Enough to make you jump out of your toilet bowl and use the stratosphere as a chaser.

 

My only fear is that sooner or later

My heart will grow accustomed to the taste of your skin

 

Confidence grows

It sounds like records scratching

Strict beats and pressure track my inclination to tap the next, sir

 

I wish that

some one – some one

Were attuned to my sooner or later thirst trap.

 

I pontificate the admirable churning of my gut as normal.

why is it that sex makes everything red?

I lose my vision when I remember things, eyes rolling back in a memory.

Noses six inches close, still, we close holes, distance within your six inches.

 

And that’s the funny thing –

It’s unnecessary.

 

I practically beg to become a huge eyeball!

Seeing the foreseen, previously known we,

Balled up.

And Categorized with the forgotten outerwear.

 

There is no feeling(s)

We subsist off of being, on.

hands, talking, sleeping.

 

I wish that

Someone would just bump this already.

 

 

 

 

 

Tori Tinsley, Hug Gone Riding, Acrylic on canvas, 24″ x 24″, 2016

 

 

 

 

 

If there is no romance, I will eat.

 

 

And from there, clouds begin to curdle.

My mother’s mold festering in the corners of my bedrooms.

Severed man-hands grabbing out of bags – not hand bags

On the floor of my girlhood, would

Vomit from hands in gesso on the wood

Floor.

 

Why do they call drowning in yourself consumption?

There can’t possibly be a displeasing way to be eaten.

By death I inch forth, teething bite and nail.

 

What they mean is: truth must have room for emptiness.

Greed pushes out truth;

And I am suffering

Here, in the post-McDonald’s clarity.

My terror.

 

Is it greed

That pushes me away

Is it me that goes

 

If I wasn’t being consumed by all that isn’t,

I would be making something new.

Stitching a safety net out of blue.

I would know how to make the room dark for the length of an exposure

or how to mix

emulsion

or remember how to sing for sure.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Tori Tinsley, Nose Pick #1, Acrylic on canvas, 48” x 60”, 2020

 

 

 

 

 

January sixth or January 6th

 

 

With one integer on the clock, I stare past the white wall of the year, back

against the iron lamppost of time.

January sixth or January 6th: sounds like a cold day. Now soldiers sleep in

marble floored corridors while everyone hides in their homes. This is what

I see on the outside.

A collective mind does not mean much of nothing, so long as this collective

does not have the choreography of process to perceive of itself.

I am embarrassed by myself. In the pinky, gossamer folds of my mind, let’s

call this region “The Plaquemines of Mischief”, one such troll is making me

laugh too loud alone in my room. The embarrassment lingers like a familiar

glamoured as this dazed feeling that hovers like heartburn and probably is

heartburn. My Hips!

Take into account my body.

Despite that, I know I am 2 am part hydraulic, part triggered. Spewing out

– you guessed it – fluids.

But all of these immediately futile responses tend toward failure simply

because they assume one rational condition of being or another, like

presence or…

Is it so bad to assume?

Obviously the answer for everything doesn’t need to be brought to its

logical opposite extremes – but, it’s nice to think about.

How difficult to find the time to say the truth.

Perhaps that’s why I can’t admit the question just doesn’t seem worth it to

answer or otherwise.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Gabriella Andino is a writer, dancer, and dreamer of radical futurities. As an art historian in practice, they focus on clarifying histories through embodiment, remediation, and archival research. Gabriella currently lives in Bulbancha, AKA New Orleans, LA by way of Athens, GA; where they received a BA in Art History from the University of Georgia. http://www.gabriellandino.com

 

Tori Tinsley (b. 1980) is an Atlanta-based artist. With the use of exaggerated facial features and dark humor, her work explores the layered emotions and vulnerability inherent in caring for another. She is the recipient of an Idea Capital Grant (2015), City of Atlanta Emerging Artist Award (2016), and a Joan Mitchell Foundation Painters & Sculptors Grant (2016). Recent exhibitions include HUGS, a solo show at Laney Contemporary in Savannah, GA, and Of Care and Destruction: 2021 Atlanta Biennial at Atlanta Contemporary.