@ Aaron McElroy

The devil may indeed care, but there is a good chance he will simply stand idle at our emotional butchery while the moonlight plays delightful tricks along the contours of the young woman’s pubic thatch and each of her freckles is counted as a mirthful stone hurled…against an absent asbestos choked God.

By Brad Feuerhelm, ASX, March 2015

It is a fragmentary discourse. Bodies lie softly pinned down and seemingly unaware of the click whirr; the diseased embrace of the camera’s mechanical whine. Desire on nearly every frame, light skinned and bleached in accordance to the vectors of unmitigated distrust we cast on each other and on these objects. There’s blood on my trousers and glass fragments in my shoes. We are housed in a dining hall with active participants bearing fruit to consume from the trees of deceit. The Virgin Mary coyly and jokingly plays the crack trumpet while another matron Eve takes a bath in Ophelia’s shadow, water filling her sagging lungs. The devil may indeed care, but there is a good chance he will simply stand idle at our emotional butchery while the moonlight plays delightful tricks along the contours of the young woman’s pubic thatch and each of her freckles is counted as a mirthful stone hurled…against an absent asbestos choked God.

Methamphetamine stages its last motor rally here across my own lungs and the insidious buzz of fruit flies hangs in the air. Mouthfuls of sand will be kicked across open spaces, particles dissipating in a dizzying luminescence. Even on the most joyful of occasions, we will hide long knives in our smiles. We left a mattress inconsolable and indented with the manufactured presence of our bodies…pretending we were ablaze in the light of pinpricked stars. Here, we found our purpose on the horizontal court versus the habitual fragmentary slip back into the abyss under the bridge of uncertainty. Habit. Spite. The retrograde anthemic is so disproportionate and menacing. Never look back. Never Look Back. A mantra of a severed personal idolatry beckons.

@ Aaron McElroy

Whereas before skin and plant-life consumed every page, he has begun to venture into uncertainty with the personally iconoclastic, images of drug abuse, alcohol consumption and blood loss.

And I will miss you when you go, when you untether yourself from my arms. I will bear witness to your need to abscond and I will consider, with concrete effort the reasons of this failure, of this collapse, of this love, of this lust, of this loss, of this languishing need and I will digress sloping towards another in a series of soft targets. Irreverently we bleed from the soles of our cracked feet until we find a moment to breathe in those light pardoned particles filling our own sagging lungs. We reach back down our throats with a fist covered in spittle, blood, and the bile from our stomachs, which we have placed our hearts only to pull them back out through our windpipes handing these menstruating organs to each other like a relic of a saint who knew what it felt like to live in the ecstasy of moments past.

Aaron McElroy’s “The Devil May Care” from SUN editions is a step forward in terms of his work. Not only is it the nicest publication of his work to date, he has taken pains to venture outside of the normal box of his reason. Whereas before skin and plant-life consumed every page, he has begun to venture into uncertainty with the personally iconoclastic, images of drug abuse, alcohol consumption and blood loss. Having watched his work for the last couple of years, I am very excited by the prospect of his diaristic intent outside of that of the female form. He is reaching towards a new maturity for which the rewards in his work will grow increasingly greater.

Aaron McElroy
The Devil May Care
SUN Editions