MARC BRESLIN - ‘till the cows come home

We are 26 years into this new century. A ripe, shortsighted blindness is the common denominator, making it difficult to plan for a future besides one that feels increasingly, severely, leaning towards a doomed/oblivion-based survival only, “enjoy it while you can!” mode. If coral could talk, it would be screaming – not to mention what humans do to one another. We had high hopes in my youth of the 1990s about what life might be like as we reached our western 2,000-year-old birthday. Flying cars and diseases cured. The September 11 terrorist attacks happened as I was beginning my freshman year in college and none of the aspirations that Minoru Yamasaki had when he designed the World Trade Center Towers felt possible anymore. Reduced to gelatinous fear, human beings lose their ‘being’ and become merely human, fragile things composed of soft tissues, easily damaged and prone to failure. The ‘being’ part is what makes us possibly interesting. It is the segment of our shared reality that paradoxically permits us to levitate above our individual, projected, lived experience and imagine, or become, something other. This realm of the other could also be referred to as consciousness. Here we share more in common with trees and birds and all organic material on our planet than we typically tend to acknowledge. The common stone although it lacks any of our 5 senses has the unique ability to record without prejudice. This, too, must be a type of consciousness, if not, a duty or a tool. I find it telling that we have the ability to send humans into space but lack the ability to decipher and communicate in whale or birdsong - that we can peer into the vastness of deep space with immeasurably complex devices but still have yet to understand the depths of our oceans or what lingers down there in the deep. What good is peering into the future if you can’t see what is presently in your face. I really like what Hiroshi Sugimoto says about photography. Here it is for our shared enjoyment – “For me, the camera is a device for capturing the world as it is…. To use a figure of speech, the world as it is, is like a pure white screen, and your eyes are like a projector manifesting your own world upon this white screen….The camera, this “unsullied eye,” sees the world as it is. (Hiroshi Sugimoto, “The World As It Is,” memo from June 1995). Since the beginning of my artistic production I have employed the camera as a tool to assist my painting practice. I do not consider myself a photographer. At best, I act like a tourist documenting things that capture my eye and sometimes I attempt to frame an image in a way that pleases a reptilian part of my brain. The fact that I prefer making paintings rather than producing prints says more about how I like to spend my time than it does about my respect for either medium. I believe in art’s ability to create a better world because I witness this happening within me. I think ability to create a better world because I witness this happening within me. I think when Manuela asks for and then holds my hand in the particular way she does, sometimes squeezing the part just above my thumb, that this is art. When an infant who is just figuring out how to juggle gravity with new wobbly legs falls and cries to be consoled by its parents that this, too, is art. When the wind is just right, blowing offshore, it takes the tops of waves and blows it back over the crest forming a moment of sparkling rain that can produce rainbows. This is art. Carey told me the other day, once, when he was skydiving, each cloud had a rainbow; they were everywhere. I asked him to make a drawing of it and it’s great. I’m not sure if he’s ever made a drawing like that since he was a kid. It’s just like how you would picture it. Rainbows on clouds, everywhere… The images I create are part of a vocabulary that I do not understand and I am not particularly interested in understanding the why of it except that there are a lot of images to paint and I do not want it to become rote. This is a good space for the kind of surprise I’m into. I am engaged with visual art. I know that writers or filmmakers are infinitely better at producing the narrative sort. I am writing this on Naoshima Island in the Seto Inland Sea off the coast of mainland Japan where Manu and I are spending part of our honeymoon. The architecture, artwork and natural surroundings here are spectacular. It is a big lesson maker in the same way that, with the right glasses on, every day is. I didn’t want to have any press release for this show but my friends Jake and James both said that for someone who enjoys reading and writing as much as I do that it would be a shame not to do something. So for better or worse I think this is it. I’m not even sure what I’m going to have in the show but I don’t think that really matters. I started making some work with Japanese influences before we came on this trip to Japan so I was doing a little projecting of my own. We’ll see what happens. Manu is sleeping next to me on a table crafted from planks of Yakusugi cedar, over a thousand years old, and I’m trying to get to a space where fear subsides and the being part is allowed space to become human. I’m thinking about this life and the possibility that there just might be something else after we stop breathing and drinking one part oxygen to two parts hydrogen. To think that there is nothing (and to think that there is something) seems terribly human to me….. Marc Breslin, Naoshima, March 7th, 2026 A brief note on the title - we could talk about this ‘till the cows come home, but I think what it means is that forever is just another word for something else. I prefer to think that the cows will come home. And if they get lost and spend the night out, I hope they had a good adventure and maybe even got into a little trouble. They’ll be easy to spot in the morning.