NADA Special Edition featuring Tamar Halpern, Hannah Whitaker, Marianne Engel, John Lehr, and text by Ed Schad
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Full text by Ed Schad:

 
Paper on a rotary copier jumps its plate in a back office somewhere, 
printing inky hatch marks in the margins of something we can't read. As 
though taught a lesson, veils, screens, loose folds of paper, materials 
from the edges of things, collage to surfaces and are riven with light. 
Here, they become our voices, fractured but whole, exposed from
a mountain of negatives and lying flat, exchangeable, a shifting set of 
obscure puzzle pieces. This is what was made and we made it. No one but us speaks. 
A voice with hiccups is still a voice.
 
We would shine a flashlight in to check for Copperheads, and once, 
two eyes glinted coldly from the rock. Dead breath lingered from the open mouth of 
stone, but any last words were distant. The rocky canines of the crevice 
had bite only because the darkness wouldn't close. Robert Creeley's words 
punished from a quiet place, "For love -- I would split open your head and put
a candle in behind the eyes."
 
Our eyes hold the child's epiphany and we look as a child, off the main 
road onto the gravel, at the beginning of a curved future where round bales 
can only be marshmallows. Locked here, lights dance as the chemicals of the 
photo dance, and the glow, sparking the tree line, can only be heaven, can 
only be charged possibility, until the moment slowly begins to melt. 
The glow burns into city lamps, the world of business, the firefly, the
world of pain, the adult world.
 
The oceans, once imponderable, increasingly turn into bartered lace and 
diamonds. Each lake slowly turns into the final bone in the dog yard. 
The bleak law of the spider with lustful arms open atop the heal-all, 
the cold design of the finite, clips the edges from the days. It is neither 
morning nor night, but instead always 3 o'clock. Buildings are made of tin and 
concrete. Their purpose serves nothing more.
 

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