What about Brooke and the Wolves?

What are you scared of?

Media? Pressure?
The pressures of media?

Listen: I'm posing you no more threat
than a soft floor of moss leading
into a wild wood of green and shadow.

All I'm doing here,
at the edge of this blogpost,
is pointing out a thing that
will make your dark day brighter
or add a sweet touch of darkness to
whatever's just a bit Too Damned Bright
in the waking hours of your life right about now.

Never mind the rest of Brooke Gassiot's installation,
a multimedia grouping of work called "Pressure,"
now on display at Pump Project until February 15th.

Never mind the big central piece that required, we imagine,
most of the project's Kickstarter funds to be completed.

Yes, it has resonances for a hundred MFA theses built into it,
just waiting to be unpacked by budding young art scholars,
and it's an impressive structure that starts with a refurbished mid-century TV console on the floor
and ends with huge papier-mâché and tulle representations of steam in the rafters.

But, no, I said never mind that.

What kind of wild animal are you that you
don't do whatever some blogwriter tells you?

Are you a wolf, is that it?

Are you a – listen, don't mind the lightboxes, either.

Don't mind the two lightboxes, more like Gassiot's usual work,
that comment on the installation as a whole even while displayed as part of the installation itself.

No, wolf, I said never mind those.

Jesus. Could you possibly be more fucking undomestic?

Don't mind those things,
don't pay attention to those things,
nor to the clever sculpture that Gassiot has added to the Pump Project's actual pump.

Really, wolf.
We're not here for that.

Other places will feature reviews about all of "Pressure," you can be sure;
there may eventually be more learned explication than anyone, even the artist,
can bear, because there's a lot going on in the show and yadda yadda yadda.

We're here because, look,
there's one work within the installation that you really need to see.

That you should just drive on down to Pump Project to see –
you are a driving wolf, right? – before the show closes.

Just – damn it, wolf, stop looking at those other bits –
just check out that large, clear, acrylic enclosure jutting from the far wall.

Look at the small wolves within that enclosure, suspended above the gallery floor,
standing at the edge of a floor of moss, of greenery, of wilderness that continues on,
growing wider and wilder, until it goes all the way through the wall
and scatters into verdant chaos in the shadows on the other side.

Look at it, wolf.

Look at it and howl for a feeling so well captured,
for a perfectly rendered vision never to leave your memory,
for the ability to see such things in the heart of this urban sprawl
in which we, resolutely wild or resignedly tamed, live and breathe.

Howl and howl and howl and howl.