The Story: Higgs Ocean…
Conceptual story as built by featured artists Ben Holmes and Payton Kaeding for April 2025 installation of Higgs Ocean, Higgs Meadow at GURE, run by Chicago curator and indie gallerist, Sharmarke Ahmed.
My little sister was in the first grade when she asked my mom for an Elf on the Shelf. All of her classmates had them. My mom said no. Regan made one for herself out of playfoam and surgical tape. Plastic transmuted into polystyrene (plastic). Presumably interchangeable materials. In reality, maybe they are. Fiction, however, has higher standards.
The hotcakes-children’s-book-toy-wombo-combo was published in 2005 and sells for 30 dollars retail. The story goes that the Elf on the Shelf creeps around the house at night. Like that thing I’m sure I’m not making up— the binoculars attached to a long pipe with mirrors on mirrors. Pitch-black ping pong. Santa’s eyes in a plastic face.
What exactly is your persuasion on the Big Man, since you brought him up?
God with material privileges. Myth lodged in object. Matter with virtual provenance.
Regan was bullied by the children with real Elves On their Shelves. Plastic equals plastic. But a phase shift, a loss of symmetry. Rain bubbling into snow, a doll frozen forever.
How would Santa know if she deserved her lot?
You don’t want to be bamboozled; you don’t want to be led down the PRIMROSE PATH
Enter: The Catastrophic Localization of Myth? No. The Tragic Specificity of Appearances.
Replicating the literal composition of the elf is a mistake. All matter is proto-magical, candidate for poetry.
How a painting looks is what it does. The elsewhere offered by a photograph is never the elsewhere it depicts, etc. Innumerable pilgrimages in vain.
But a phase shift, a lateral move.
The material and aesthetic qualities of the world unified once in the projected space of a painting. In its appearance. And again in the surface. In the paint.
Unified but duplicated, the problem always one order of magnitude away. Veracity reproduces and expires in concentric circles.
I AM THE KING OF THE NORTH POLE
The true spirit of Christmas is supersymmetry. Reality and Fiction entangled, dependent, bidirectional. Never superimposed, but oscillating, both only referenceable in the negative: reality becoming a way of looking, an idea, entering the arena of fiction like a gladiator; any fiction of sufficiently high-quality being interpreted invariably as reality.
Their conversion forms a perpetual motion machine. A platonic meadow between seeing and believing. A Freudian meadow between me and dad. Dad propping the elf by the cookie jar, me on a train towards the north pole. We could live through the end of the world this way. Me through you. You sound asleep. Tom Hanks repopulating the earth in the credits.
You don’t want to be taken for a ride. Railroaded!
When darkness inevitably falls, everything is whole again. Unified in visibility or invisibility. You close your eyes, the elves open theirs. Red light, green light, categorical difference. Higgs Ocean, Tom Hanks Ocean, magic back and forth.
The motion produces waves, emits particles, excites strings.
Meanwhile, Regan sobs quietly. Mike reattaches the surgical tape, animates the abomination into a compelling still life.
E pur si muove. And yet it moves.
Alternate Flyer for Higgs Ocean, Higgs Meadow
Digital Collage (2025)
by Ben Holmes
