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HOSTING TEXT

welcome to memory island
we want you to touch everything
before we touch down
on where x marks the spot

thank you for being here with us together
thank you annie and gallery tpw
thank you ocad for the grant which has made gathering possible
turtle island
specifically here
the traditional and ancestral territory of
the mississaugas of the credit
the haudenosaunee
the anishinaabe
the huron wendat

this place,
roughly
“where the trees are standing in the water”

or possibly
“gathering place”
“plenty”
its buried tributaries and rivers
its shoreline arfiticially constructed
by colonial industry
and yet as candice hopkins writes, which
“eludes colonial cartography and control”
because “even soil isn’t fixed”

even soil isnt fixed
it builds into a mound of our own creation
memory island builds into a mound of our own attention

we want this world to feel open
and real because it is yours

we want you to touch everything
Rocks
Flowers maddie
Food claire
Nik poster
Wishes to donate

finally thank you to lily
My friend of truest heart

welcome to memory island
we want you to touch everything

CASON SHARPES'S INTRODUCTION

when lily and i were dreaming about hosting
we were walking in the middle of the street in the middle of the night
we wanted to invite people we would feel comfortable and excited introducing
for me the answer immediately and clearly was cason

every time i think of cason, everything else gets pulled up
this eliza niemi line, "i never met someone up close whose songs i thought were good"
cason was my first art writer i felt some human proximity to
he caught in tight knots what falls through

this thing my crush once said about being funny and right
i think cason is both funny and right
and that what links these two is a rigour of precision of noticing
he understands what a moment is

which translates, too, to the choreography of his performance

the real luck of being alive right now and knowing or knowing of cason is the chance to get to see him perform
bc he is a true performer

in a completely different context from this,
i saw him perform a life changing rendition of video games by lana del ray at owls club karaoke
he twirled the mic wire and we went with it

his own words echo
in one column he wrote about house of wax:
"there’s some vague messaging about good eggs, bad apples, and the redemption of black sheep, but the most coherent idea House of Wax manages to communicate is that some people are nice, some people are mean, and some people are twins."
some people are nice, some people are mean, some people are twins, some people are funny, some people are right, some people are cason
and i feel so lucky to get to invite him to the pitchers mound
welcome, cason