The heart is a cruel magician. It tricks us into believing rhythm is a universal law. Rivers of blood flow through our veins at a conductor’s pace. Wind sails in and out of our lungs with an orchestra’s precision. We nod our head to the beat. What a beloved song, what a farce. Defined as the abnormality of the heart’s rhythm, arrhythmia is not a failure but rather an inconvenient truth. It is the organ exposed for what it really is—a ticking time bomb. 

In a year spent frightened and fascinated by her own arrhythmia, Jess(ica) Valice began the first of the nine works that comprise this exhibition with the triptych. A man, inspired by her late father, dissembles a drum kit, and engages in a bizarre performance. Instead of in-sync, he plays each piece of the set, it appears, one beat at a time. This is a sonic portrayal of the break-up of a one-man band. It is happening at lightspeed and slow motion. His talent is both frayed and exacting, lazy and ingenious. Behold a musician framed at his agonizing peak and his soothing trough. Is this trio of glimpses, perhaps, a kind of musical ellipsis on the back of a funeral memento card? Or, instead, the first few delicate notes that became the heartbeat of the artist herself? Valice’s trademark faces—tight-lipped and unflinching—reveal nothing. This time, the oversized ears seem less a stylistic callback to past work, and more necessary as equipment. Not simply to bask in this limping instrumentation but to face the boos and applause and questions from the audience. 
When the charade of the heart has been exposed, what remains are the clues lurking in the faces and figures behind the curtain. What do they reveal? Might they know something we don’t about how to carry on living with explosives trapped in our chests? 

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— Alex Dwyer