ratio . Trey Ross, Shuai Yang, Cesar Herrejon, Joey Serricchio, Sue Shu, Saun Santipreecha. “I am at last beginning to be housed like a human being.” But only because I’m finally far enough away to feel your vertigo. My grasp on me. (I’m on hold.) Or, at least I’m finally close enough to start drifting away, at last. I am my moon (I’m mooning myself? Probably just getting waxed.) And still sunburnt from watching my flames, seeing my city burn. Anyway, I’m out of touch by now… losing my grip. (Seriously I’ve been sick for months.) 12 Caesars, or 16 Candles? But only because “I LOVE MY EMERGENCY” as much as you do. Because “an alabaster fidget is impossible to imagine….” Nevertheless they spent a long time wanting to fuck statues And having hair that didn’t move when a wave came. Nobody fucking understands, when the building coughed up the white Rubble of everything, whitening us with its dust, a little blood on our lips We were the real’s dead mimes. Or stained minutes. secants stained with alabaster’s word. A toothy smile, , a forked tongue. But like I said—I am at last beginning to be housed like a human being. This was something the Roman Caesar Nero said when entered his newly built palace Domus Aurea (Latin for “Golden House”) for the first time. This decadent palace was built in the direct aftermath of the Great Fire of Rome in 64 CE. A fire for which he was justifiably blamed since it was all too conveniently started in the core of the city: exactly where he wanted to clear land for the building of Domus Aurea. According to the Gossip Suetonius, the story infamously goes that Nero played the fiddle while he watched Rome burn, drunkenly spectating “the fire of Rome for three days from the Maecenatium Tower, rejoicing, and saying ‘the beauty of the flames’; dressed as a cithara-player, he sang the entire Sack of Ilium.” Finally, he had his house worth its weight in gold. In 68 CE he died by (assisted) suicide. His secretary, a freed slave, helped him stab himself in the throat. His last words were: “What an artist dies in me!” Within a decade of being built, the palace had been stripped of all its valuable materials: including, gold leaf, marble, and bronze fittings. His immediate successors restored the land to public use. Now back to beginning to be housed like a human being (in public)….“Hello, welcome!” Your entry will be logged. Your steps measured. Your gaze traced. Usually, when I walk through a door, I usually keep going (I’m supposed to fit through its frame). Usually, when I sit, the chair usually withstands my fall. Usually, if I read these letters, they should usually be close enough to see. Equipped with techniques of my body, their dysfunction is never a failure—but their hyperfunction destroys me. (My dysfunctions become ‘specialities’ and “special needs”: I generate a surplus each time I don’t become something already built.) Like an immune system, any ‘functional’ process shits where it eats and a balance must be maintained: a pacemaking ratio of inputs to outputs. Bijection, surjection—and especially injection. But the pacing moves faster than the function, so it gets hyped… blown out of proportion. A blow-up doll turning blue. Like a body, it shits where it fucks and fucks where it eats but never skips a beat. (Never forget: any system always rhymes!) Usually, one pill makes you larger, one pill makes you small. Either way, you’re on target for elimination of the threat. You’re an illuminati: “The reader, the thinker, the loiterer, the flâneur, are types of illuminati just as much as the opium eater, the dreamer, the ecstatic, [the Caesar].” Either way, we are at the end of the Seizers, the settler’s lifespan. (Postictal.) So at last I am beginning to not be housed like a human being. After all, “One thing in any case is certain: man is neither the oldest nor the most constant problem that has been posed for human knowledge.” After all, “The struggle of our times is one between the overrepresented figure of Man … and the human, who must now struggle to free itself from this overrepresentation.” A human being that’s more than the human. After all, we are still in search of the length of lost time. After all, what an artist dies in me. __________________________________________________ | trey ross (b. 1999) grew up in the Silicon Valley. He currently lives and works in Los Angeles. His work engages ceramic and lithographic processes in an experimental practice that explores the natural, technological, and magical. [His recent solo exhibition Future Fossils was presented at Long Play Contemporary in Santa Monica, CA in 2024.] | Shuai Yang (b.1998, Beijing, China) is a New York-based visual artist. Practicing across sculpture, printmaking, drawing, painting, and installation, she investigates the conflicts between the lived nature and man-made laws, specifically challenging the system of measurement. Yang received her MFA in Visual Arts from Columbia University School of the Arts and a BFA in printmaking from Massachusetts College of Art. She has exhibited her work in a three-person exhibition at Eli Klein Gallery (New York) and has shown at Hudson River Museum (New York); Lenfest Center For The Arts (New York); Society of Arts and Crafts (Boston); Chambers Fine Arts (New York); Storage Gallery (New York); LATITUDE Gallery (New York); theBlanc (New York); DeCA Foundation (New York); Fredric Snitzer Gallery (Miami); Abigail Ogilvy (Los Angeles); Accent Sisters (Jersey City); among others. Her work is collected by the Hudson River Museum (New York) and the Artemizia Foundation (Bisbee, Arizona). Yang has received reviews and interviews from Impulse Magazine, White Hot Magazine, and VENTI Journal, and has given talks at the Pratt Institute and the Massachusetts College of Art. She is a recipient of the GlogauAIR Artist-in-Residence (Berlin, Germany), Vermont Studio Center Residency (Vermont, U.S.), Nars Foundation International Artist Residency (New York, U.S.), Rockella Artist Residency (New York, U.S.), Morty Frank Travel Award, and Donald C. Kelley Travel Award. | Cesar Herrejon is currently an MFA candidate at the University of Colorado Boulder focusing on mixed media painting and drawing. He is from Birmingham Alabama. Growing up in the deep south, Cesar was involved in the skateboard culture around his teen years and draws influences from these childhood experiences into his work. Currently his work also explores materials foreign to academic artistic expression that parallel and enrich his cultural heritage. He often uses defamiliarized quotations from culture in his work like the surrealism that he finds deeply rooted in Mexican Culture. Art is the only thing that has interested him, and it is the only thing he has found to feel passionate about and build his identity with. His studies and research included printmaking incorporating it with painting and drawing. | Joey Serricchio is a conceptual artist and sculptor working across interdisciplinary mediums, currently living and working in Los Angeles County. Their practice explores systems and infrastructures—both tangible and intangible—operating at various scales, from the intimate to the expansive. By focusing on the banal and fleeting, the monumental and inescapable, the tender, the callous, the vast, their work invites a closer look at the systems and forces that shape our lives. Their work is rooted in questions of permanence, safety, and inevitability, often taking the form of assembled sculptures, temporary installation, or systematic intervention. Through these mediums, the artist seeks to reveal the mundane moments that turn into emergencies. Joey Serricchio holds a BFA in Fine Art from ArtCenter College of Design. Their work has previously been exhibited at Kylin Gallery, Tropico de Nopal Gallery, and sidebitch Project Space. | Sue Shu (she/her) was born in Shanghai, China. In 2023 Shu starts to immigrate to America. Shu lives and works in Los Angeles, CA. Shu is a process-based artist who makes multi-medium sculptures. She received her BFA in fine arts from the California Institute of the Arts in 2022 and is currently an MFA candidate at the University of Southern California. Sue Shu (she/her) was born in Shanghai, China. In 2023 Shu starts to immigrate to America. Shu lives and works in Los Angeles, CA. Shu is a process based artist who makes multi-medium sculptures. She received her BFA in fine arts from California Institute of the Arts in 2022 and is currently an  MFA candidate at University of Southern California.  Shu is the recipient of USC Roski Departmental Fellowship. Shu also received the Macomber Travel Award to in 2024 to travel to Jingdezhen to research and learn techniques of the ramie fabric.Shu had her first solo show When the Monster Speaks in 2024, at Attom Gallery in Lincoln Heights. Her riso zine was collected by LACA. Shu had her thesis exhibition we are becoming clouds in March 2025. | Saun Santipreecha (b. 1989, Thailand) is a composer, interdisciplinary artist, and writer who works at the intersection of image, sound, and body. He has had two solo exhibitions at Reisig and Taylor Contemporary in Los Angeles, CA (Dandelye—or, Beneath this River’s Tempo’d Time We Walk (2023), and …These Things That Divide The World In Two… (2024)) as well as a solo exhibition in Rome, Italy (Per/formative Cities, A Nest of Triptychal Performances (2024)). He recently had his first institutional commission for a sound and sculpture installation in the ADN East German guardhouse at the Wende Museum (2024). His work has been in various group exhibitions in South Korea, New York and Los Angeles.  His compositional work in film, television, and fashion—many of which he worked on under the pseudonym S. Peace Nistades—has been screened in over thirty film festivals worldwide including the Cannes Film Festival as well as at New York, Paris and LA Fashion Weeks. He has worked in numerous capacities in the music department for a number of composers including John Debney, Danny Elfman, The Newton Brothers and Abel Korzeniowski. He was invited to speak at the 9th Annual Conference of the Samuel Beckett Society—Beckett and Justice—at California State University, Los Angeles on the panel Beckett, Justice, and Thai Artist Saun Santipreecha in conversation with Beckett scholars Katherine Weiss and Feargal Whelan (2024) and has also served as an Industry Mentor at Musician’s Institute (2020-2022). He is currently based in Los Angeles and continues to work with artists and specialists across disciplines including film, fashion, and performing arts. {Biographical information courtesy of the artists.} ____________________ Image Caption: Trey Ross. Metal plate etching on porcelain, with glaze, metal oxides, lustres, stains, and frit. 4.5 x 3 inches. [Detail (macro).]References ________________________________________ References (in order of appearance): Ariana Reines, The Cow, (New York: Fence, 2006), 18. Excerpted and deranged fragments from “I LOVE MY EMERGENCY.” “He sang to the accompaniment of his lyre while his city was consumed by fire.” —Cassius Dio, Roman History 62.20.2⁴. “It is said that he often sang the tragic lines from the ‘Sack of Troy’ in stage dress from a private stage… while the city was in flames.” —Suetonius, Nero 38³ Suetonius, The Twelve Caesars, trans. Robert Graves, rev. J. B. Rives (London: Penguin Books, 2007), Nero 38 “...et incendium Romae triduum nocentissimo proposito spectavit e turre Maecenatiana laetus et ‘pulchritudinem flammarum’ ait, indutus citharoedici habitu decantavit Iliacenam exitu omni.” (‘He watched the fire of Rome for three days from the Maecenatium Tower, rejoicing, and said ‘the beauty of the flames’; dressed as a cithara-player, he sang the entire Sack of Ilium.’) Tacitus, The Histories, trans. Kenneth Wellesley (London: Penguin Books, 2009), Book I, §18. "The pleasures of Nero’s reign had absorbed huge amounts of public and private property... but the new emperor restored much to the people and to the state.” Walter Benjamin, The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility, and Other Writings on Media, ed. Michael W. Jennings et al., trans. Edmund Jephcott et al. (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2008), 37. Michel Foucault, The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: Vintage Books, 1994), 387. Sylvia Wynter, “Unsettling the Coloniality of Being/Power/Truth/Freedom: Towards the Human, After Man, Its Overrepresentation—An Argument,” CR: The New Centennial Review 3, no. 3 (Fall 2003): 260.