When Jesse sent me his notes for this exhibition, the first thing he shared was, “This is a show for dark times.” And when someone who is as cordial, compassionate, and complicated as Jesse sends you something as heavy as that, your initial response likely ought to be to sit with the statement, at least for a moment; I chose to sit with the accompanying images and objects, sit with his ideas, and then sit with my own ideas of what exactly I was looking at for quite some time.

This exhibition is titled Escalator. When one thinks of escalation, what most comes to mind? Currently, we – as a collective community – have to consistently contend with escalating global tensions and escalating personal anxieties. The former has been an ongoing, overwhelming fear for decades now, but we have been trained to compartmentalize it in a way that has seemingly made few folks in our daily lives get too worked up about it or distract them from their own minute-to-minute tasks. The same thing could be…