Bridging respective otherworlds, Crocosmia the novel and Love Hours the exhibition both approach abyss, transformation, catastrophe and revolution with means that resist capture in old dualities and power formations. Fissures, ruptures, destruction and rebuilds are spaces of exploration where both projects trouble false divides between the contemplative and the active, idea and object, prayer and polemic. Mellis and Kahn share efforts at the “endless undoing of the West, with all its violence and harm,” in their parallel works, which dovetail across forms, meeting here where the literary and the visual might intersect to release liberatory imagining—where a book can be an incantation and an exhibition can be a repository, and both can be catalysts. 

Kahn and Mellis met in seventh grade, in their public school social studies class and have been close friends since. Both children of radicals, visionaries and workers in San Francisco, they moved through the thickets of adolescence and early adulthood together—making sense and nonsense of the world. In their early twenties, they co-founded a writing/dance trio, made a book of texts and performed together in early multidisciplinary experiments. Kahn and Mellis live in different cities now, on different trajectories, but continue coming into being, as people and makers, in relation.