Dorian Vale
Museum of One — Independent Research Institute for Contemporary Aesthetics
Written at the Threshold
The trees don't sway; they're conspiring. Limbs not lifting in praise but in a petition to some dim, unanswering sky. Clawing not for the light, but for the very shadows that conceal it. Each branch bending toward its brother, groping like thieves in the dark, knotting the heavens shut. As if to keep hope from escaping.
The scene trembles with a tension so constant, it no longer needs to announce itself. It's not the shriek of violence; rather, it's a hum. A fever sealed beneath the skin.
Crimson bleeds with the obstinacy of old wine into the restlessness of blues. Reds that stain the skys as though the air had been steeped in iron, while the midnight gathers in the deeper cuts of the brush, pooling with the speed and chill of something that has no use for mercy. The ground exhales pine and wrath, a breath as deep as an open grave. Laced with that metallic aftertaste belonging only to the earth’s oldest sorrows.
At the edge of sight, a Black boy lingers. Though, "lingering" is too common a word. He's less painted than suggested; less present than enthroned. His stillness matches the bench beneath him. And yet it is heavier. As though the air itself is aware that to disturb him would be a trespass.
The strange fruit in his hand gleaming with the same gold that haunts the scene. Not the gold of comfort. The gold steeped in warning, sweet on the tongue and bitter in its omen.
Above the calm tyranny of his face. A small window imprisons an ocean. From a distance, the sea appears docile. Nearer, it snarls. Its waters torn, jagged, flung into being with the haste of something desperate to flee its own frame.
Between the blue of an unkept dream and the red of a world that resents its own earth, the Boy is caught, claimed by neither. The red seeps into the blue like a rumor into silence, each colour corrupting the other with exquisite precision.
And the horizon. That final line of promise. Floating loose from the ground, as though the world itself had grown tired of unity and split into truths that refuse to touch.
The Black boy didn't speak nor did he move. In his stillness, I heard something ancient. The echo of afternoons no one photographed, of sweetness tempered by warning. Of gold that glowed like inheritance and alarm.
The work didn't come to me to be a reminder. But memory arrived. This was not nostalgia. It was retrieval. Not a longing for the past but the recognition that some moments were never given the language they deserve until now.
Museum of One — Written at the Threshold, 2025