WORLD-SEEDS: Grieve understands these twenty-three pieces as “world-seeds”(बीज), for creating particular experiences.  What is a seed? A seed is a unit of reproduction, capable of becoming another such unit. Grieve reports: “Take your index finger on your left hand and twirl it in a circle. Not halfway. All the way. That circling is a seed. It pulls down the universe. It goes beyond the marks here and into your own life. Have you ever seen a dead snake on the road? That is a seed.”  Maybe less oblique, the concept of a world seed can be experienced in Grieve’s mobile, <<9>> Cosmogenesis (2017), which depicts the birth of the solar system in a bloom of butterflies.

 

For Grieve, seeds neither represent nor order; they do not mimic being nor engage power. Instead, seeds become. They force themselves to take place but can only do so through planting themselves in what is not themselves. Like a broken hammer striking emptiness, or glitching static before the invention of electronics, or even the eyes reading these words right now, these twenty-three seeds lick up against the margins of reality by documenting how art transmits meaning. Take for instance, <<10>>> Samsara (2001), in which the spread of happy-face balls changes social relations like ripples when you toss a pebble into a quiet pond. Each ball is a seed. And the piece is a seed dispenser. As any gardener knows, however, to sprout seeds, you need to place them in the correct soil.