Lydia Chodosh





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 Interior Atlas
Spore Site
Artifacts of Countability
Clock Studies
Translations of Gratitude
Artifactual Accumulations
Color Theory
Atlas
RISD GD MFA Biennial


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Light or In Limbo
 Volume 1
A Guide to the Politiverse


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Writing, 2023Rhode Island School of Design

Light or In Limbo


An essay zine written in fragments on moving through in-between places, written by Lydia Chodosh in the winter of 2022, and published by the New York based micropress Choo Choo Press, the following spring. The work was on view at the RISD Graphic Design MFA Biennial in April 2023 and read live at Black Spring Books in August 2023, alongside beats by samuraijacques and cocktails by Antidote. 

Written by Lydia Chodosh [Excerpt below]
Edited by Taylor Zhang
Designed and Riso Printed by Emily Bluedorn
Available for online purchase.

Light or in Limbo [excerpted]

There is an abstract quality of night that is potent with dreams and escape and journey that answers to my desire to not capture the literal events . . . The night is where we could feel the complexity of being both free and chased. These are the words of the artist Guadalupe Rosales. I first encounter them in a gallery beside a quadrant of her photographs — each one captures a dark corner of Los Angeles, the city where I grew up.

I pause inside the gallery’s chill walls, a happy  reprieve from the city’s sticky outdoors. My eyes dart from left to right, then up and down — each image offers a soft reminder. The hillside reminds me to look out. The palm trees remind me to look up. The park, lit by bright streetlights, reminds me that I continually fear going blind. The sidewalk, lined with stucco facades, reminds me that  looking is not the same as watching, and neither is the same as seeing. 

I glance over my right shoulder, and then over my left, as if I’ve suddenly been caught in the dark. 


On a late morning in November, I drive past a long row of cars flashing their brights. A row of them, hundreds of feet in length, waits patiently for the light to turn green while on the opposite side of the median, I rush to get home. I’ve just stopped 
to pick up a large ream of paper, something shiny our local supplier sells in excess. Something they call Stardream. 

While awaiting my signal to turn, I glimpse a  delicate shimmer on the dashboard of each pulsing car. I inch closer to find the word funeral displayed there in uppercase letters. It reads less like a warning when I see it repeated, upright on some cars and off kilter on others; more like poetry. 

When I exit my studio later that night, I look to the stars. My neck careened upward, the chill breeze of the near-winter air gathering in the pit of my nostrils, I have to squint my eyes to decipher sparks of light through the clouds. Sparks of stars. 

I think to myself, some of the plainest pictures can hold us captive, and wonder why I spent the larger part of my day arranging complex shapes on a page in search of the perfect pattern.