Fleurette West
sixteen rooms, three guests and five ceilings too low to stand up in
Voices are strange once collected. Gathered in pools of association, cadence gives way to noise. We enter the bath and it enters us; sound and signal break down, pass through. In this ablution we acquire a new name, a composite calling that is almost unpronounceable. Our new name is not one but many.
close your eyes
You are floating in warm, salty water and a breeze stirs your exposed skin.
[feel: surface]
See the interior of your eyelids shift from red to brown.
[know: cloud]
It passes and the blood is bright again.
open the door and walk inside
There are no walls here, only windows and beds. Pupils that were pinned by glare now expand. Beneath your feet the light filters onto curling carpet pulls. Draw your fingertips across pedestal paintings and find something to place—a notepad or a book, maybe your legs or the back of your head. It’s okay to touch here.
Fleurette West (b. 1982, Lynwood) is an artist who lives and works in Los Angeles. Recent exhibitions include Master Bathroom, The Homer Project; Thus Spake the Fungus, Arturo Bandini; and Monocoque, DIANA, all in Los Angeles. She received an MFA from the USC Roski School of Art, and in 2015 was the recipient of USC’s Kathleen Neely Macomber Travel Grant to research the architect Eileen Gray’s modernist villa E-1027 in Roquebrune-Cap-Martin, France. West’s practice explores notions of composition across painting, sculpture, and architectural installation. By revealing the artistic potential of materials typically embedded within the built environment, she calls attention to how materiality produces consciousness in the domestic imagination.