Mindy Rose Schwartz at Et al., San Francisco

I flip ahead in a book I’ve only just started and am startled by a familiar name. I read a paragraph at the beginning of a chapter out of context and take it as a sign:

Day Something. Dreams about Cassie. I woke up and actually saw her stand at the door of the cave. Then she vanished; I mean became again the patterns of rock and sun-spots-in-my-eyes I’d been making her out of. Hallucinations aren’t just “seeing something”; they’re a special case of perception in which you work a little harder, that’s all. ¹

There is something about a human that is more electric than a photo, more convoluted than the most thorough biology. Mindy Rose Schwartz’s art is that ‘work a little harder’ version of seeing.

Sculpture of chalky bone and golden webs of tendon, these sculptures are pastoral and graven, spectral cat’s cradles dripping shadows.That thing in a movie when a spell is cast (or un-cast) and all at once vines stream and swirl and buds form and bloom? Something of that, the exhibition as the site of conjuring; artworks as tools of vision.

1. Russ, Joanna. We Who Are about to… London: The Women’s Press Science Fiction, 1987.