The Sun Hovers Horribly at Low Angles Like a Slow Plane was crafted through my embodied experience of the stagnancy of winter, poisoned by a dream about eating vile street snow. A need for deep blue began to glow inside of me, like a need for nutrients, replacing the usual need for the presence of red. The Sun Hovers is a space with two entrances, one grand and quiet, the other up a staircase. The paper, though anchored, billows with the displaced air of the walker. Entrance lions sit on the curtain rail, shoulder to shoulder, acephalous, denying the concept of an entrance. Tall rectangles echo through the space, but in a quietness. The essence of deep blue reverberates. The installation on the stage, an unconventional annex to our MFA gallery, presented many extant features to engage with or remove. Elemental objects, such as the 800 lb. spot lit stone resting on a neatly folded wool sweater, both counter and supplement the religiosity of space. The interventions rely on the stage’s form and significance, but quiet it, enclosing it with anchored paper and obscuring the modularity of the curtains which could open to an audience. Standing like model ship’s sails, the paper creates a room/stage. When you step into a channel built into a closet area in the back of the stage, the entrance in the paper wall is offset slightly. Vertical tension, clustered objects, large scale drawing and sparse lighting compel the viewer through the space. It has been an exercise of training the horse, training myself on a visual goal. The aims to amplify and modify the space include built structure and cast objects, which have a greater time signature than the drawing process and the intuitively responding and arranging to a space. This is a development from prior, shorter term projects that relied more heavily on gesture and response, though those elements remain present in this work. Removing all but one curtain, leaving the curtain rails, removing the colored glass stage light covers, removing some hooks, leaving others, sanding off some of the imperfections of the floor, leaving others, vacuuming, oiling and re-oiling the floor, dusting the curtain rails and painting the walls and vents was the first phase. Familiarizing myself with every feature of the space and attending to them all was essential to an intentional outcome. The effort was to make the space more body-friendly. The stage is a place for dance and movement, more so when maintained. The effect of this work is evident both in visual outcomes (clean, selected elements remaining) and in the trace of my activities of care. As experiential work, it will appear marginally empty to an impatient viewer; the trace of the labor of wall building and plaster work recedes visually, and it has to, or every building would be a visual cacophony.* The trace of care on the other hand pools in the space, removing the architectural austerity and sparseness from its native association as exclusive, cold. The warm tones of the wood floor reflect onto the cool, clean deep blues. Crisp white walls are punctuated and echoed in the white of the plaster lions. Blue appears three times, blue saturates the work. The Sun Hovers is saturated with all of my behind-the-scenes attempts to interact with the origins of the color blue, to concoct the antidote to the un-rotting snow. Bucked by the literal, I had to allow these attempts to make blue with milk paint or with indigo fall away. All the process work would coagulate and refuse to emulsify, it was too loaded to integrate with the space as color alone. A blue section of wall surrounding the plaster disc, a small blue enamel pot and some blue blossoms remain, cards from my blue deck, working toward balance in the composition and the matrix of winter. Now spring’s tempestuous ascents and plummeting produce and harrow new leaves while last year’s persist in a pierced mat, run through with the spires o