In the fourth essay of Ross Gay's Inciting Joy, he anecdotally addresses our capitalist obsession with time, beginning with a memory of seeing a Post-it note in a coffee shop stating, "Be Right Back," a message often met with annoyance. We exist in a patriarchal, product-driven culture where time — and how it structures our lives — functions as an equation of our worth. What of calm and inviolability? What of dreaming? What of finding our breath? Be Right Back offers to stop time, to offer sanctuary to find our breath and feel ease, to provide a place where we go when we put up a sign saying, "Be Right Back."

The work in the exhibition collects seemingly disparate objects into an immersive breath. Earlier in Inciting Joy, Gay describes deer emerging in an unexpected place as he reflects on the death of his father. The sighting is seen as a blessing, "That it'd be okay." When I read Gay’s description of this moment, I was immediately brought back to the point where I left my parents’ home, knowing it would be the last time I saw my father alive. He had been diagnosed with excessive small cell cancer months earlier and it was ravaging his body. I stepped out their front door, and just feet away, two deer leapt across my path. In the many years my parents had lived in that home, I had never seen deer so close to their house or had any experience remotely similar. It was a moment of embodied cognition — where the body and its interaction with the environment plays a central role in understanding. I felt peace and rest: deer are longstanding symbols of grace, messengers, and reference spiritual power. It’d be okay.

This embodied cognition of Gay’s and my experience frame the work which includes textiles (thrifted deconstructed and reconstructed clothing, used dryer sheets, hand-sanitizer ink transfer, and sublimation dye), LED sculpture (with donated layrngoscopes), voice, video, and drawings. The intimacy of the drawings creates a pause, the exhibition origin is a “‘re-charge’ of people's attentional capacities. A video of deer sightings projects on a hung textile scrim made of translucent material — a montage from my many chance encounters with deer since my father’s death. These materials connect to histories of those before, histories of the body and its need for reprieve in order to function. Accompanying sensor-activated voice is meditative and ataractic. A sense of "felt safety" occurs — a core tenet of attachment theory which begins at birth: aliveness met with nurturing (documentation by Aaron Wessling of Single File Studio).