L U S T,
f o a m,
&
M DN GHT BLUE

Caroline Cooledge McCraw

(1) L U S T — a found language piece that rearranges text from St. Thomas Aquinas’s Summa Theologica, wherein his section on lust problematically ranks the sinfulness of sexual acts. This piece is an incantation, a seduction, using Aquinas’s own words to enter and engage in conversation about our respective legs [Latin root: “law”] with a randomized [chant][prayer][whisper in his ear] for each of his six species of lustful vice. Digital piece loops for the average interval of time necessary for a male to achieve climax via self-stimulation, or two minutes.

(2) f o a m — a love poem.

(3) M DN GHT BLUE — built around a personal archive of field recordings collected over the span of four years and four continents, this video (07:25) explores what becomes of memory, how memory takes up space, and how the memory of feeling // the feeling of memory is transferred and transformed between one person and another when words cannot suffice.

Artist’s Statement

My work is concerned with the futility & possibility of language, how language fills a space, the digital voice, how words are transferred & what is the loss, translation, mediation, the act of naming, the future of words :: I worry about the ethics of writing, the damage of language, the trade-off between accessibility and experimentation :: I am curious about collection and extraction as a poetic act, hierarchies of information and experience, infinitude :: I am interested in cross-pollinating formal, conceptual, and visual structures as a way to investigate the social structures that inform language [& silence], finding corridors for empathy within the cracks of language’s instability, creating a site that accommodates the urgently unsayable.

Caroline Cooledge McCraw is an artist and writer living in Chicago. She received her MFA from The School of the Art Institute of Chicago, and is currently studying digital humanities at Loyola University Chicago. Her work can be found in CalamityLiterary LaundryGadfly online, and among other collections, publications, and external hard drives. @c_c_m_c_c