We are quick to brush away a dream or omen. We fear losing more than time by its examination. We wake up to the weight of our anchors— a body, an appointment, a job. And it is these calls, the ones that are easily recorded, that seem to dwarf whatever softer footprint lighted in our minds the night before. Jeffrey Stuker holds his own visitations in reverence, eagerly tracing their intimations. In his work there is no discernible fear of getting lost, perhaps because also present is an assertion in the interconnectedness of all things, or at least in the ability of those separate parts to communicate across apparent boundaries. Seated in this understanding— you are never lost. It is the moments that are delivered to us in sleep or by synchronicity, the alarms we didn’t set, that prove to be more significant than anything we could conjure by our own volition.

 

In a dream, early on in the lockdown of the Covid pandemic, Stuker was visited by a butterfly. Its wings had the appearance of two dead leaves and it was resting on the paper-like bark of a tree. Upon waking Stuker discovered it was a known insect, the Kallima Inachus. Taking this name as a lead, Stuker uncovered that Inachus was also a king in Greek myth and that Sophocles had recorded one of the king’s most notable stories on papyrus, a paper that over time takes on the appearance of tree bark. In the summer of 2022 Stuker went to ‘the Egypt Exploration Society’, a papyrus laboratory at Oxford University where Sophocles’ fragments are now housed, to study them and make sketches. Feelings Out of Season is Stuker’s exchange with both his dream and the places it led him. The results are carefully assembled images, palimpsests of nature and myth.

 

–Marty Windahl