Elsewhere, SLOTH is sewn into the left-hand corner of the fabric the word stands listlessly inside an ample amount of white space, as if committing the sin it names. MOST ARROWS, one fragment says (or does it claim?) the phrase nearly fills the entirety of the blown-up fascicle (all works 2021). Lightning-quick inspiration is slowed to wondrous delay, as if contemplation and perception themselves have been caught by the silver tether of the New England mystic’s pencil lead and translated into thread. One is transformed from a viewer to a reader, and the art is a kind of translation, of deciphering the quick hand of a poet jotting language down at the speed of thought. I suspect this very quality of consideration is the artist’s main concern. Dickinson’s notes, written with who knows what intent, gain a different status and gather to them a rare attention via Bervin’s tender replications. Bervin has taken fragments of language that Emily Dickinson originally scrawled on small scraps of paper-sometimes just a single word-magnified them sixfold, then embroidered them with silver thread on fabric grounds made from cotton batting, muslin, and mull. But walking away from Jen Bervin’s exhibition “Doing and Undoing,” I felt such a realization growing in me. A subtle question asks itself not in words but as a feeling, a disquiet amplified over time, when an artwork takes root in the mind and the imagination grasps a difficult lesson: that an ethics is forming inside an aesthetics.
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