I’ve spent so much of my life wandering through galleries in New York — ducking into openings, tracking down a particular work I just had to see in person, encountering exhibitions that have stayed with me for years. Now, surreally, one of those gallery shows is mine. THIS PLACE WAS HOME BEFORE I LIVED HERE: POEMS AFTER JANGAR (Sept 25 - Nov 6) begins with Jangar, the centuries-old Kalmyk-Mongolian oral epic, and with the idea of poetry as a technology of inheritance: a way of carrying language, memory, identity, and imagination across time, distance, generations. The works move between ancestral and contemporary systems of transmission: oral tradition, beads, binary code, scrolls, symbols, cyanotypes, sculpture, voice, verse, generative imagery. They continue my longstanding interest in the digital as something handmade and embodied — something we touch, count, and craft with the digits of the hand — and in language as simultaneously visceral and virtual, a hybrid being not unlike the one we’ve become, and are becoming. They reflect my fascination with resonances between my nomadic roots and the ceaseless movement and “placelessness” of our increasingly mobile, networked world. And they deepen my curiosity about how one of humanity’s oldest technologies, poetic intelligence — a synthesis of emotion and algorithm we use to make meaning — might help us better understand the ones we are creating now. Opening tonight, 6–8 PM SAPAR Contemporary 9 N. Moore Street, New York There will be Kalmyk tea…and my mother has made bortzig… I’ll also be around this afternoon and Saturday morning for walkthroughs if you can’t make it tonight — please send a note to arrange a time.