Exhibitions

EILEEN HAVANT TOWNSEND: THE MYSTERY OF CAVE ISLAND

Tops Gallery / 400 S. Front St. April 25 - June 20th (Reception: April 25 5:00am - 7:30am)

Eileen Havant Townsend

I live up on a hill looking at another hill. The hills often glow. Light that is high up in other places is lower down here. The house has a small porch, a fire pit, and flagstones in the yard. We dry our laundry on the line. I try to wake up early in the morning. The light doesn’t reach us for quite a while yet. I often pack my lunch. When I eat persimmons, I make sure to point out that they are a gift of the season.The fence grows passion flowers. We live up the hill from two gas stations. I cannot seem to break out of my own perspective. I read books about the 17th, 18th, and 19th centuries. I hope one day to get a dog, but the fence will need to be sealed. From where we live you cannot see the ocean nor smell it. The air is light and dry even past dark. On my morning run I observe the curvature of a plant. Many plants here are comic. In the northeast, where I used to live, plants were more serious. I have heard of a statistic that about 18 new kinds of insects are discovered per day in the Amazon jungle. At the beach, I observed a couple spear fishing in the seaweed forest. They wore wetsuits and carried spears. I must be brave. I must swim down and spear the halibut. I must drive to and from the shore. We tried to bask amongst the rocks but it was a cloudy day. Nonetheless, Peter swam, wearing a long sleeve shirt, his long black hair and vampiric white skin disappearing slowly into the surf. Near the beach, several houses had recently collapsed because of shifting ground. Some mansions become cheaper as time goes on. I wish a lamp of a fish to show me the ocean’s true canyon. The blue black water. A rusted luxury liner. A second earth. We came from it and will return to it. I drove to La Jolla to see the seals and the sea lions. What differentiates them from each other is how they ambulate (is that a word?) – how they mobilize. The seals snake their way down the beach. The sea lions use their arms. I live in a country of infinite dead lizards and dead-like tortoises. Of hilarious cacti. Of the glowing hill. Of the dead Christ, of his white plaster passion. Of the sweet date. Of the 5AM moon.

– Eileen Havant Townsend

Eileen Havant Townsend is an artist and writer living in Los Angeles. Her writing on culture has appeared in The Paris Review, Artnet, The Brooklyn Rail, The New York Times, Los Angeles Review of Books, The Cut, Vogue, and The Village Voice, Memphis Magazine and The Memphis Flyer among other publications. From 2017 - 2022, she lived in the Adirondack Mountains as the editor of The Northern Logger and Timber Processor. Townsend holds an MA from the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism and an MFA from SUNY New Paltz. This is her first solo exhibition.