The culmination of over a decade of travel and image making, Wind in the Cage threads together Red’s recurring encounters with spaces, objects and structures caught in a process of moving away from their imposed roles as containers and conduits of capital. The book traces a journey across transitional sites where moments of tension, tenderness, and healing find themselves in central view. Surfaces and forms suspended atop the deep black pages of the book emerge with a rhythm that invites quiet viewing.
Close attention was paid to the qualities of ink on paper. A photograph traced meticulously in graphite encloses the volume where delicate layers of white, black, and gray rest on black paper. As images emerge from the dark, a hopeful thread builds momentum: patterns of potential and liberation.
I had thought to ask a kind and likeminded friend to write up a fitting piece to contextualize this work. To put into words how I see things: my focus on symbolism, my desire to interweave vastly separate places, my attempts to draw together a commonality of experience living under this late stage of collapse, and to envision a gap in which our worlds can grow and renew once again.
I could have asked any of these loved ones, who over the past 10 years and more have held the necessary conversations and journeys with me. Together we have charted a course around and through the feelings and ideas that this age continually conjures up: finding ourselves simultaneously lost, opened up and at many times stripped down to our bare essences. It is in some of those moments that the frenetic pace of things seems to slow to an almost silent rumble, one that asks for the clarity to see beyond the fences that have been constructed around and within us.
And so I decided to write this myself, to you, to us, because a wind is blowing now, it always has, we all feel it no matter how or where we are. Its touch reminding us that we are, and can all together be, so much more.