Adriana Keaton
From her mind's eye, she watches herself reach into the deep pocket of her tweed coat, matching shape to memory to identify each object before extracting the lighter and extending it to the cigarette between her lips. She jerks her calloused thumb against the spark wheel twice before cupping the small flame and bowing forward to ignite her cigarette. She inhales deeply. Pauses. Exhales.
"You're a fucking narcissist," she mutters audibly to herself, shifting - correcting her posture.
It's like looking at your reflection in a storefront window. There are depths of seeing, but they all leave you feeling exposed.
First, you look at your reflection. Take note - maybe even make adjustments - pull down the hem of your skirt. But always, there is the worry of being watched, both from outside and from within.
So, simply you see your reflection, standing there with the cityscape behind you, but is there someone inside, on the other side of the window, hidden by the mirror-like glare? A secret witness to your self-watching? Or someone unseen, meeting your gaze - an accidental direct object just beyond yourself?
And outside too, on the street, there is a scene of people coming and going. Maybe a passerby, watching- breaks your self-captured gaze. Embarrassed, you meet their eyes. Caught and forced to acknowledge their power.
But they probably don't notice, she thinks. No one ever really notices.
She sighs a stream of smoke and shifts her gaze outward, blinking the neighborhood parkette back into focus. Another drag of her cigarette. A shiver, it's fucking freezing.
From this she remembers girlhood, the walk to school - the tips of her fingers numb from the cold. Her hair plaited in two long braids, saddle shoes, and a red plaid coat. Even then she knew what she wanted to look like. There was already a cinematic expansiveness to her self- observation.
A murder, she'd say out loud each time she passed the church roof lined with crows.
And here, now it's somehow those kid fingers, frosted in the cold, that pull cigarettes from the nearly empty pack in the sweeping scene of a woman staring into a storefront or smoking alone on a park bench.
I met Adriana through one of Lucy K Shaw’s fabulous lil Shabby Doll workshops
Shout out to Lucy, who does a wonderful job organizing and putting those together.
Check Shabbydollhouse,com for more
Adriana lives in Buffalo, New York and in the workshop, i think, obviously I wanted her work, man, like there’s so many great people but Adriana is one of those people who like you can tell is real about her work.
Plus, she reminds of one of those kids in preschool who knows everything and always has something to useful to share if you’re behind. A friend to everyone but always a little ahead of the others.
One day I imagine she’ll be teaching her own workshop.
I consider her one of the people who actually gets shit done while I’m more of a slacker who wants to hang with people and pretend like I’m gonna do something the next week, fortunately I’ve been able to trick her into thinking this whole thing is real.
She’s a very talented and outspoken person who I’ve watched develop her ideas over time into a very real thing. She gets her shit done.
THE RINGS OF JUPITER
Ƶ is annulated by compositions of ultrafine nanostructural nonspherical colloids in dust aerosol... the halo, the primary rings, the two gossamer rings... whose asymptotic graduations transition from one ring to the next without distinguishing themselves as distinct entities... whose colloids’ fleeting existence at an individual level—through 85 to 8,500 solar periodic durations in the corporeal integrity of that unique colloid is buffeted by plasma, electromagnetic perturbations, and solar radiation pressures—are accelerating out of corporeal existence... becoming a radio wave.
The limited duration of the particulate corporeality—the reflective re-emission of solar photons transposing away angular momentum from each unique colloid (relative to the internal axis of rotation of the colloid) and accelerating the orbital speed of the colloid relative to Ƶ... slowly decaying toward the exosphere—and the endurance of the annular figuration, are suggestive of perpetual material replenishment of the dust aerosol from the release of dusty ejecta of meteoroids, micrometeoroids, and infrequent asteroids impacting the proximate satellites 4, 14, 16, and 15 (e.g. 126,000km 3 of dust—2.6082x10 17 kg of dust—is ejecting from the impact forming the crater centered at 30°N, 30°W on satellite 5, a captured ellipsoidal asteroid, an ice matrix rubble pile... non-simple polyhedra of sulfur, aliphatic polyols, and silicates in a matrix of water ice; particles of the ejecta traveling at less than 3.22m/μ☼—amounting to 38% of the ejecta—are gravitationally drawn back to the satellite... material is ejected at 130m/s at the epicenter with velocities diminishing exponentially outward; 1.617x10 17 kg of ejected dust loosed into orbit, diffusively settling into 6.5205×10 34 km 3 , occupying a space in the gossamer ring 5.175x10 29 times larger than the crater).
The rings are vague—a luminous presence only orienting to ☉forward scattering into a diffraction lobe 2.7° wide relative to the equatorial zone of Ƶ—and not radially consistent but are discontinuous (including the very distant satellite 6 ring... not a complete annular structure, but is—evidentiary of the inchoative becoming of the event ramifications—an arc, adjacent to the orbit of satellite 6, from whose ejecta (the product of a catastrophic collision event... with another satellite) the ring is composed) with interruptions furrowed by orbiting satellites... most disruptively, the orbital paths of satellites 15 and 16 are creating a prominent transition (a void of material collected by the passing bodies—ferrous ice satellites orbiting Ƶ (rotating with the extreme velocity of 0.45km/μ☼) with orbital durations shorter than a Ƶsol (or (☼) solar day)—exerting gravitational spheres of influence drawing dust—ejecta from previous meteoroid impacts—agglomerating back onto the satellites) between the main ring and the satellite 5 gossamer ring.
Most volumetrically significant the halo ring is the radial extrusion of an asymptotically decreasing triangle (on an axis normal to the center of Ƶ) whose maximum height (the face most proximate to Ƶ) is approximately 20,000km, although its concentration of dust is a laminar fuage in empty space with millionths of grams of colloidal material for each cm 3 of vacuum... the exiguity of the material diminishing luminous presence into commensuration with the other rings that are more concentrated but in a much narrower cross-section.
A 1mm 3 -sized coarse silicate grain is orbiting Ƶ in the satellite 6 ring—unobstructed by anything larger than 1mm 3 , through dust suspension, tidally locked to Ƶ (1.43x10 33 times larger)—orbiting... approximately 0.17km/μ☼ for 1.7x10 5 solar periodic durations—the orbit decaying 1mm each 10,000 solar periodic durations, with a constantly increasing rate of decay, a logarithmic spiral trajectory in response to the gravitation of Ƶ... never repeating the same geometric relation to Ƶ, which itself is constantly changing location—struck in a chance glancing collision by another 1mm 3 -sized fragment—on a trajectory resulting from two asteroids colliding—is producing .07mm 3 of dust dispersing into 3.6225×10 10 m 3 of space in the satellite 6 ring... the silicate fragment never again contacting another object (anything apart from strewn, diffused dust) in the remaining 33 billion years until the universe collapses, until the 1mm 3 silicate fragment comes into contact with all of the material and energy ever to exist.
John Trefry runs inside the castle press and you can find him on twitter at @incastellated.
John Trefry
Illustration by Adriana Keaton
