Jim Drain

I am that body lying on that very comfortable couch. After basketball practice, I would come home to Grandmother Avra's house and take naps on it, often waking up facedown in a pool of drool and chintz. The couch was re-covered in this altered Jamaican flag fabric for a recent show at Greene Naftali. I was listening to a lot of King Tubby then and found the Jamaican flag similarly simple and kingly. I am interested in the places where the body becomes obscured outwardly, for instance, through the display of deranged pattern and ornament. The body wants to fall apart, lie down, and go to sleep. The sculptures I have been making do this or want this, but like the body (or maybe just my body), inwardly, there is a desire to achieve something non-degrading, beautiful, perfect, pure, special, total, symmetric, cosmic, great, coxcomb, and cavalier. For the show, this couch was completed with a body plopped on top of it. Avra's couch acted as a weird doppelgänger to the sculpture. Read as furniture, it seemed slightly out of place.