“End of Day” was an exhibition of sculptures I made during the pre-vaccine part of the Covid-19 pandemic and presented in the spring of 2021. The context in which I made this work was, by necessity, extremely circumscribed, and I yearned to expand the world of this work beyond what had come to feel like a conversation with myself. I invited sixteen individuals to each choose a specific work in the show and write a text in relation to it, performing it live either from home or next to the work itself within the gallery for an online audience. The sixteen contributors came from every corner of the social world of my art practice—artists I’ve collaborated with, curators who have made my shows, artists and historians I have taught with or studied under. I asked them to participate in part because I missed the social bonds that take place within an art career and which were temporarily suspended during this time.

I described the invitation to contribute to “Circling the Square, Words from End of Day” in the following way: “When I make performances in my work, I make that movement in response to my sculptures. I make the objects first and then I watch them and listen to them, trying to hear what they want to happen with our bodies on and around them. I am thinking of these texts the same way. They are not meant to be primarily about the objects, though analysis can certainly play some role. Rather, they use the work as a point of departure for thinking and speaking. You are writing from, or to, or with, or because of your chosen object. What do these sculptures propose?”

The contributions, many of which I heard for the first time at the live event, were remarkably different from one another and consistently surprised me. They were poetic and factual, research-based and personal, legible and opaque. Each one engaged with an individual object on its own terms, in a dialogue between person and thing that greatly exceeded my understanding of my own works. Further, they exemplified the capacity of even static objects to make things happen, serving as propositions for thinking and doing, both alone and with others. They subsequently were made into a book by the same title that served both as a catalog of the exhibition and a record of the performance.