excerpt from "Punctum"
by Corinna Chong

… sting, speck, cut, little hole … that accident which pricks me (but also bruises me, is poignant to me).

—Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida

What she liked about the masks was that there was nothing subtle about them. Ugly, they announced. People avoided her, the weird artist with emotional problems. Even other artists avoided her, mistrustful of the blatancy of her metaphor. She would smile at them from across the shared studio space, and they would return smiles flimsy with trepidation.

The mask she was finishing now was caked with a thick, gooey layer of epoxied mac and cheese. She’d been thrilled that she’d managed to figure out the technicalities of preserving the texture of the sauce, gone sticky after sitting for too long, the noodles clinging to each other in lumps. On the cheekbones, a few squirts of ketchup, darkened to blood-red under the resin, wormed down the lumps.

The mask was one of a series of twelve Ivy would be presenting at the end of the month to Silk Machine, a private gallery on 11th ave that had exhibited her previous sculpture series last year. She’d already made a mask with ground beef and peas, another with burned fish sticks and tartar sauce. Blue and white—cake with bubble gum icing and buttered mashed potatoes—were next. Lining the eyeholes of each, peeking through the food, were the distinctive black strokes, swooping up like wings, of traditional Chinese opera masks. She would be displaying them fitted over plaster busts cast from her own body, lined up, one behind the other, in the middle of the gallery space. Viewers would be invited to walk among them, weaving between to get close enough to discern that yes, it was not artful simulation, but real food. Real, familiar food that would inevitably conjure up visceral reactions and even memories. This mattered to them. It was the punctum, Trevor, the director of the gallery, had explained to her, practically giddy when she’d pitched her ideas for the project. She’d had to look the word up.

They were not made to be worn. She’d told this to Javi the day before, annoyed at the time that it even needed to be said. But now, working alone in the studio by the dim light of her desk lamp, she felt compelled to try. She lifted the mac and cheese mask to her face and pulled the elastic strap over her head. She’d used herself to cast the plaster base, but somehow it still surprised her how neatly her face slid into the contours of the mask, a slight suction locking it into place. She looked out through the small holes cut in the centre of the eyes, which framed triangles of cropped shadows against the orange glow that the lamplight had thrown on the wall. The stinging smell of resin, laced with old cheese, filled her nostrils.

 

 

 

From The Malahat Review's spring issue #226