As Nietzsche (1886) notably writes, “if you gaze for long into an abyss, the abyss gazes also into you.” This installation is an invitation to step into the abyss, into absence, into the ruins and remnants of what remains when everything else is asked to leave the room for a bit. You see, my heart broke open awhile ago — and a great and vast nothing spilled out, only silence, reverberations of a quiet despair, empty walls, and only a hollowness left to say — I have never been more afraid. I wanted (could do no other) than stand before you, stripped of jargon, of anything other than silence and emptiness and abyss and absence. I used what little I could, I used only what remained, the only tangible thing left: the body, if it could even be called such a thing. Is the body a presence or an absence? If you gaze toward me, I will gaze back into you. The abyss in me sees and honors the abyss in you — there, there, there I will meet you. There, where there are no words to articulate the absolute nothingness that sometimes rings about inside the human heart. I invite you in to hear the echoes.

Bio:

Jacqueline Viola Moulton is an interdisciplinary artist, writer, and philosophy scholar - a PhD Candidate at the Institute for Doctoral Studies in the Visual Arts. Moulton creates experimental philosophy and poetry zines under the moniker The Depressed Waitress and runs a burgeoning creative writing program at Cottonwood Center for the Arts