“Make a list and create a web of choices. Neapolitan, aside from being three bands of cream, is the delusion of saving yourself the labor of deciding between this, or this, or that. What is the merit of accepting the terms we are given? On a summer day, for now laissez-faire, but we are unwavering forever. Neapolitan, aside from being a person of Naples, is an absolute. Chocolate, vanilla and strawberry. Understand that to avoid a triangle is to have more than three members of the absolute—so make a square, another square, another square—vanilla, chocolate, strawberry and Dijon. That one is yours.” – Press Release, Neapolitan Elbow

“I trust you with special things” is an excerpt from the title of a text Steffanie Ling wrote for the first exhibition she curated at CSA Space, Neapolitan Elbow. “I trust you with special things, please make me a sandwich” was written between studio visits with the painter Aaron Charles Carter. The text reads as an index of alternating reflections on artist talks attended and lunches taken together in the weeks leading up to the exhibition. In 2016, this text was collected in Nascar (published by Blank Cheque) a collection of short stories, art writing and other sips of shared experience among Ling and her milieu of Editors, Painters and Merchandisers in Vancouver.

Ling will read akin texts from Nascar, as well as new art writing and poetry written on the occasion of exhibitions and collaboration. She will elaborate on the artworks they take departure from and share a reading list with the audience.

Copies of Nascar will be available for sale.

STEFFANIE LING is a producer of criticism, pamphlets, stories, essays, exhibitions, reviews, bluntness, anecdotes, shout outs, wrestling storylines, proposals, applications, jokes, readings, minimal poems, poems, dinner, compliments, and diatribes. She lives in Vancouver (unceded territories), frequenting The Cinematheque and other air conditioned spaces. Her books are CUTS OF THIN MEAT (Spare Room, 2015) and NASCAR (Blank Cheque, 2016). She is a curator at VIVO Media Arts Centre and an editor of Charcuterie. She is currently working on her second short play.

I trust you with special things – Reading List

Interview between Fabiola Carranza and Steffanie Ling On Ling’s Nascar, published in C Magazine