P,
Here are some thoughts.
In your last letter you told me about a dream.
This is what you wrote:
“I had this dream that I cut a hole between my legs, immediately
upon doing it I thought fuck, p, why did you do that. It didn’t hurt I
was just like ugh, fuck—this will be hard to undo. And I looked
down and realized all my insides were falling out onto the floor.
Again, it wasn’t painful, I wasn’t experiencing pain as much as a
resignation and disappointment like, ugh, fuck. I dropped the jar of
pasta sauce. I did something thoughtless. I made a split-second
decision that is impossible to undo.”
An afterimage.
Property 01, 02, 03, etc.…, are a set of Polaroid pictures that capture, in varying degrees of abstraction, anonymous genitals—asses too. The pictures are imprinted on green and purple film, a discordant pairing that pulses. I’ve experienced this before in your work: lighting schemes that attempt to, as you say, “optically exhaust” your viewer. The Polaroids are of you and your friends, some are jarringly explicit, while others are murkier and harder to read. They are anatomies drained of signifiers—race, age, gender, health—but reconstituted by another kind of presence: a performance. And though they are all distinct and encased in their own little metal trays, the Polaroids flash across the room, like parts of a whole. One body? Many?
More thoughts that come to mind as I look at the Polaroids: parts that are filled and those that fill, asses and genitals that leak (all of them), their smell, their tenderness, pliability, elasticity, transformed by sensation and feeling. Their anonymity (though, let’s be honest, not to you.) Their hair. That they are a morphable part of the body shown more often in action (or to induce action) while here, they are at rest and with another purpose: to leak intimacy. I picture you giving your camera to friends to take their own picture, in private—and the erotics of friendship too—and you building metal trays, pouring resin, entrapping the prints, like evidence, alongside stray hairs, dead skin, fingerprints.
Then there is Wanting: a taut metal scaffold wedged between walls, on which pounds of used clothes slouch, off-gassing histories. Whose clothes are these? Where are the bodies that would have filled them? The whole is traversed by LED lights that make a poem, a kind of subtitling for the scrim of lumped fabric. But I can’t say anything about the poem since you haven’t sent it to me yet, so all I picture are indecipherable words in lights.
You wrote to me that the work in this show is, somewhat, about forcing things into visibility. Yes, but what I’m seeing is more forensic and studied: a magnification of what was there all along, perhaps even in plain sight. Forensic from the Latin forensis, is “of the forum”—as in, what can be communally understood as fact? As in, what is made true by being made public?
In your work, you often talk about the violence of things being extracted from bodies—“politics, sensations, ideas, culture, whatever” is how you say it—but this show feels gentler, like a an act of gathering or tending, coaxing something from its private life, into view. You wrote, “someone pointed out to me—maybe it was you—that my work often has this quality of making things inside out.” A snake being skinned, animal guts spilling out, thermal cameras scanning a body, a surgical camera threaded through a pipe, acid corroding a conduit, piss, vomit, day for night. So, come to think of it, maybe it’s not gentle. Maybe it’s insidious because it’s tinged with violence or threat: the threat of being exposed, of possessions being reclaimed, of dispersion, of dying.
Which reminds me of something I’ve heard you say: “to be alive is to be undead…” but dying, (how private: to be dying), and shedding skin, oozing sweat, scattering hair, scent, tears, cum in public, until you die.
x L.
–Lauren Mackler
P. Staff (b. 1987, United Kingdom; lives and works in the United States) studied at Goldsmiths College, London (2009) and was part of the Associate Artist Programme at LUX, London (2011). Selected solo exhibitions have been held at Lafayette Anticipations, Paris (forthcoming); Bonner Kunstverein, Bonn (2025); David Zwirner, New York (2025); Ordet, Milan (2024); Kunsthalle Basel (2023); Commonwealth and Council, Los Angeles (2022, 2018); LUMA, Arles (2021); Institute of Contemporary Art, Shanghai (2020); Serpentine Galleries, London (2019); Irish Museum of Modern Art, Dublin (2019); MOCA, Los Angeles (2017); Chisenhale Gallery, London (2015). Selected group exhibitions have been held at Fondazione In Between Art Film, Complesso dell’Ospedaletto, Venice (2026); Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam (2026); Astrup Fearnley Museum of Modern Art, Oslo (2026); Taipei Biennial (2025); Serralves Museum of Contemporary Art, Porto (2025); Whitney Museum of American Art, New York (2024); 59th Venice Biennale (2022); 13th Shanghai Biennale (2021); Julia Stoschek Foundation, Berlin (2021); Walker Art Center, Minneapolis (2019); Hammer Museum, Los Angeles (2018); New Museum, New York (2017); Gasworks, London (2016). Staff is a recipient of Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation Award (2019) and the Paul Hamlyn Award for Visual Artists (2015). Staff has participated in residencies at FD13, Minneapolis (2018); Fogo Island Arts (2012); and Banff Centre for Arts and Creativity, Alberta (2010).
Staff’s work is in the collections of Akeroyd Collection; Fonds régionaux d’art contemporain Bretagne; Fundación Calparsoro, Madrid; Julia Stoschek Foundation, Berlin; LUMA Arles; Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; Museum of Modern Art, New York; Saastamoinen Foundation, Helsinki; Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam; Tate, London; and Whitney Museum of American Art, New York.