Grief-broken stranger, rest thee underneath
These shady bowers; if wine can make thee glad,
Enter this pleasant place, and drink thy fill.

(from The sháh námeh by Hakīm Abol-Qāsem Firdawsī Ṭūsī)

The 2000 Sydney Olympics beautifully embodied Australian egalitarianism and a sort of rough play. I was 22 at the time. At some point while watching, the devastating revelation that I would never be an Olympian hit me. It should not have been a surprise – I was 300 lbs and had no interest in athletics, but it was my first realization that time flows ruthlessly in one direction. Luckily, CBS played reruns of Survivor opposite the games. A national phenomena, a contra-olympics, where you could watch maladapted young people wallow in a jungle, eat fish entrails, and backstab each other for money.

Where am I going with this? The advent of Survivor is also when I started my ongoing mental exercise of "team building." I like to construct imaginary teams to solve interesting or thorny problems. Want to sink Jeff Bezos’ yacht? Send in one high-end bartender with carpentry experience, one retired Navy ER nurse, and one exquisitely bitter classical pianist.

Curatorial practices are a notable version of this game. Having the opportunity to organize a three-person show at Track 16, I chose a hypothetical prompt on whic 1 to create our team. Which artists would I want to team up with to build a new museum and botanical gardens à la The Huntington? Cathy Akers and Lela Shahrzad became that dream team. Both artists bring vivid imagination to complex mediums in a way which looks effortless. Along with myself, our trio has differing skill sets but human-scale work with a sense of grandeur and some acidity.

(Text by Chris Ulivo)