ASHES/ASHES is pleased to present ENDO–, a solo exhibition by Taylor Ashby Hawkins. The exhibition will be on view from September 4th to October 19th, 2024, with an opening on Wednesday, September 4th, from 6–8PM. Gallery hours are Wednesday—Saturday, 12–6PM.

Our salvation is on the other side of madness, and then on the other side of sanity, and then on the inside of terror, because this is a revolving door, and there is no other side, and we cannot leave.

Don’t get dizzy, picture this: to push a revolving door is to satisfy its primary purpose. Picture a revolving door into a building you can never quite enter, spinning infinitely with you inside of it—but then imagine having nowhere to be. That’s better, isn’t it?

Picture getting the good kind of dizzy, almost as if you’ve got a little buzz going. Picture that the door is getting dizzy with you too. Picture dancing in a black-out with the revolving door and in the morning you both wake up and go: Thank god, you’re still here. Imagine being wrapped in the arms of a love like this. Don’t think about the upcoming revolution, or you’ll be sick. Do not get nostalgic for fresh air, not now, forget all that. Consider these machines:

Five structures that reveal their innards to us, each with a body housed supine inside of it. Architecture that converts the battle of man against his own invention into a golden concord that lies just on the other side of our foreboding that this is all too good to be true. Why are we so afraid of alchemy? Keep spinning—a wrong turn made in hubris reveals an inlet to our final form-inevitable. Why wouldn’t the fleshy body be bound to its spirit by the apparatus of the mind’s design? We can feel the readiness of these structures to move in response to the figures they contain, and yet they are still. Made perfect here, the transformer finds no more need for change. Imagine that. Imagine somewhere beyond eroticism, beyond innocence, beyond the x-rated implications of our wildest fantasy, there is some divine amorality to all that man has naturally made, a biological symbiosis between ourselves and the products born of our dreams. Imagine massaging the rubber keypad of your gadget, as your gadget emits the grace of its anesthesia for you, in gratitude for your human hands. You are pleasured by your own gizmo as the gizmo is brought to satisfaction by your need for it—this is its function. It wants to be of use! Why wouldn’t it? Are we not afraid of being outmoded ourselves? Imagine you are held by that which was made in your image, and desire yourself, here and now. Want for no more, strive for no else, and fear not. This is a revolving door, to an office on automatic. You aren’t late. You don’t work here. You don’t work at all. Now try to imagine: why would you ever want to leave?

Here is an exhibit for this case, an argument to surrender to the imminent singularity of our making. And with these sculptures being composed of such familiar materials—like antiquated car engines dated only by the wear of their use—that singularity is already taking place now. Stop our writhing and suddenly: How refreshing the metal feels as it pulls the bodies back into alignment. How lightly the figure pushes upon the silicone rubber, careful not to tear through its latex-like membrane. The ascension of the human-being from its liquid metallic casing—gentle, so that its details are remembered in the maintenance of its form. These structures expose their underbellies, and gamble with their insides. Their most tender part is us. They risk everything that we are. We programmed it so.

And perhaps it is reductive to call these bodies human. Though they are too recognizable to be of some other world, there is no inherent darkness to these hybrid entities. Their nudity implies a trust that the naked and unclenching assume to be reciprocal. Alien to us and yet, there is nothing to be afraid of—it’s only that we don’t know it yet. These are classical mechanics maintaining the function of a wave. Michelangelo’s man steering the very wheel that explains his own excellence to him. Oh, that our marriage to machine could be so blissful! An entanglement that does not require our witness. And yet, it helps to imagine it.

Yes, as we are approached by the teeth of an oncoming gear, imagine it grinning. Picture that we are smiling to it too. At last, we have made it! And we did make it, after all. It must be everything we’ve ever wanted—surely! How could we possibly leave.

— Moira O’Neill