SR Lejeune: tilt

tilt

I coaxed the blinds to their most shut when I first arrived, the first floor too intimate.

This still left a space between the slats, where curve cups curve, enough for sun to crawl in.

It used to happen at seven though now it is closer to eight. It also takes me longer to get out of the house in winter.

These lines of light stream thinly at first, then fill themselves in. Yawning across the wall for just that small stretch of morning, never quite square. The rays have become more orange; the angle we are at now is less green than in late summer. This position on the axis, a purple haze.

I want to make that hour stay all day.

I see the same system in countless windows. Ladder of temperamental strings, slats splayed like broken umbrellas, rarely in obedient alignment. Each awkward angle gets backlit at night, bright inside flooding out.

The first CD player I had I never really learned to use. I would just push the buttons until music played. That is how I feel at the window—tugging cords. The theory that I can personalize the amount of outside let in, inside let out.

The house I grew up in was sinking on one side, built on a foundation that was built on a filled in marsh. It has been determined stable for now, having settled into this new posture. When something small was lost I looked under a radiator on the northeast side. The thing probably rolled or was accidentally kicked there. Many houses on the block have a similar stance, though they do not all angle in the same direction.

The person who lived there before made himself a skylight, not dissuaded by the floor above. He went through the closet into the crawl space, building a box of clouds and mirrors inside the nest of pink insulation. Wired small bulbs so you can turn on one at a time—four switches and four dimmers— to make the sun rise and set.

I’ve been told that my great aunt used to lie on the floor of Grand Central, letting the ceiling encase her. Each commute I crane my neck up too, a rock parting the stream from the train. I’ll never get used to it.

The cloud cover does not change in the living room either, same bit of blue poking through. Like the weather is about to turn, though which way is not clear. Back on the slope of the carpet, looking up. Same frame. Determined to let the light in

SR Lejeune (b. 1994, Boston, MA) received a BA with High Honors from Oberlin College (2015), was a Core Fellow at the Penland School of Craft (2017-19) and holds an MFA in Sculpture from the Yale School of Art (2023). SR was the 2023 West Bay View Foundation Fellow at Dieu Donné and a 2025 Windgate Artist-in-Residence at the School of Art + Design at SUNY Purchase. They have additionally completed residencies at the Dirt Palace (2016), lower_cavity (2023), the Helene Wurlitzer Foundation (2024), and WSW (2025). In Summer 2026 they will be a Bemis Center artist in residence as well as a visiting artist at the Ox-Bow School of Art and Artists’ Residency. Their recent solo exhibitions include “sky light” at CHAMBER (Holyoke, MA), “witness marks” at the Dieu Donné Jordan Schnitzer Gallery (Brooklyn, NY), and “contributing structure” at Turchin Center for the Visual Arts (Boone, NC). They have taught workshops at Penland, WSW, Dieu Donné, Bard College, the Yucca Valley Materials Lab, and co-facilitate an experimental paper school in the Hudson Valley with artist Lukaza Branfman-Verissimo. SR is currently based in Pine Plains, NY where they are (slowly) building out a manual machine shop.