LILY MOSKOWITZ

WRITING FASHION ART ABOUT

I THINK THIS IS YOURS (2025)

this document was composed of forgotten objects. discovered in the pockets of pants, purses, and various clothing pieces, these items emerged as small disclosures. each arrived detached from an owner, yet ripe with the evidence of having belonged. what accumulated was not a singular narrative, but a field of encounters — an archive of overlap, where lives brush up against one another without ever meeting.

though mundane, these objects resist specificity. their familiarity dislodges them from individual ownership, allowing them to circulate more broadly as shared matter. each hovers between the personal and the generic. arranged in a translucent plastic grid, the objects gesture towards a softened field of relation that is both connective and permeable: a condition of collective possession, or even dispossession, where the boundary between body/thing, mine/yours erodes.

what happened was i worked at a secondhand shop. people sold their clothes. they left things there: ambient intimacy, some artifact, an every-day infinity. not mine but it might have been, at some point in some time. so this is a quiet disorientation, installed in memory and its loss, loosely gathered. you have seen it before. the veil is thin.

LEGS (2026)

installed in my bedroom. continuation of body-objects / text-works: a series exploring fabric as stand-in for skin, flesh as utterance, and gangled limbs.

(text reads) harmless it’s harm-less the thing will just melt, truly, she meant it when she said that, and it did, melt, so solid it was before it really is just water now, it’ll fall right through, the cracks, see you there in a very green coat, in one or another, moment or two give it cause it has been asked of you, also you recognize the sound that it makes, you have made it also you who can become for them form-less for me less, yes pool all of a sudden that’s where you have gone, are going, did you ever mean a thing you’d meant, a thing, one which vanishes on landing, go together to land, place that place, it sinks right through or catches, grip, you were told of this once, rightness left besides you like how it feels. regards, retract, re-dundancy oh happening again it is happening harm, less, it is happening. tire doesn’t flat tire doesn’t. girl, you, forming, in a very green coat.

thanks for noticing i hadn’t but we won’t always see it that way, this kind, when it meets your toes or goes forth, extended knots they are knot not knot knot not knot not not of us must be silent so i will do it you’re welcome sitting below it is easier not to feel how much taller a fistful that’s how much, fingers arms width, nose i am so fucking vindicated right now you have an idea you’ve every idea and no name, i’d give one if asked, a name is much better chosen, i see you chose yours very much, very much very chosen, red ink forty five minutes when we look at it it becomes so and it is a not knot not knot not. no matter that many times. assume. so it is. that many, once, twice, every time becomes itself. a knot that i would stop tying for, lying. the name lets a little noise through so we say it, we say it very loud.

100 WAYS TO CHANGE THE TOTAL (2025)

the installation featured one hundred receipts collected over a six month period of working register at a retail store. each receipt was physically modified in homage to sculptor richard serra’s verb list (1967) – a conceptual exercise that generates a list of fifty action words to manipulate a given material and activate new potentials. if a receipt is a recording device used to document the transaction of product, labor, and capital, its disfigurement gestures at the revision of history, utility, and exchange.

what is the potential of waste? when is an object supersaturated? how can we stretch our bodies, our occupations, our systems beyond their intended use? i approached this piece as an estrangement maneuver: substituting my demanded labor with a labor self-dictated, generative, and blissfully unpaid. the work is intended not only to violate the emblem of commodity fetish, but to enact a symbolic reorientation of how we occupy time, body, position, and space.

(movements) burn crumble stitch dye stomp fold rip shred omit strip blacken pierce staple personify digest fly authorize braid weave soak stain sculpt trace map tape roll defile bless consecrate bend twist touch shoot punch chop spray wax bruise plant bury mail graph feel mince bind absorb salt season sanitize bleach sweeten choreograph notate lyricize remember forget vow embody transcribe fade laminate predict arm microwave blend pulp renew bake mummify slice clone intersect melt sharpen reduce open close cramp tenderize soften wilt annotate vaporize pluck confuse define dissect crucify flay index polish gel glue silver crystallize contextualize memorialize redeem rot release.

IRONY FALLS OUT (2025)

a triptych installed in my bedroom.

this work was an experiment in jumbled materiality, hollowed meaning, and ambiguous interiors. mixed circuits, shorted stuffing, tactile play.
(text reads) irony of / i am so confusing jutting upwards hurtling down softly now madness peeling the wall perpendicular pink frosting please just one steady line a jolt a snag i remember sharp angles like oxymoron when the bottom falls out / of irony

BRA (2024)

(left cup) tell me what you dreamt of, i can hold it for you. i dreamed i was the hinge of a door. you walk through and collapse at the solitude. how we fold into tomorrow, fold our clothes, fold into anonymity. i dream that i awaken every blink, blinking minute and lift into the ceiling. i am calling because i dreamed you died so i dialed to check in on reality. are you still untranslatable? i dreamed i got your message and found it nightmarish so i went back to sleep and dreamed of your voice at a very low volume. i think we’ve met before but our eyes were closed. dialing dialing dialing. hi, yes this is she, i got your dream in a voicemail and it mentioned something about flowing over? i wanted to purchase a ticket for this train of thought. no, just turn on the oven. okay, what temperature - i think we’re breaking up - does the familiar become unfamiliar? it all seems a little strange. don’t worry, that’s the boiling point where sleep turns over. i dreamed i took the shape of your dwelling and my body slipped out of its shell. sometimes i use it as an ashtray or keep my silvers there. please greet the sheep as they are counted or they will scrape the drowsy from your eyes and gift it to the moon. i dream you knock twice on the side of my skull and peel back now from then. please record your message after the beep beep beep - that’ll be the alarm - good morning i wanted to tie your loose ends but i’m out of thread maybe i could tell you a dream instead?

(right cup) i dreamed that you could not interpret my silence so i composed the prettiest quiet until my teeth rotted from disuse. there’s entropy in my mouth, atrophy. in the dream you were barefooted and colored in like clotted cream because i hadn’t written anything yet and the bliss was so naked i almost didn’t recognize it. and then the chorus came in, all spit, foaming, cruel. you swam in the waves like i always hoped you would. ages ago. it was still warm then and i was new after the sand. i dreamed that you split a melon on sea rock and my skull split open too. the snow cooled away your anger and time collected in an old cigar box. i dreamed that the words were unreadable and the ink so blotted i was thinking of you at all of the wrong times. i dreamed of gossamer. i dreamed a hemorrhage. i dreamed my way out of spelling. ragged, provisional, sunny. i dreamed tuberculosis. we were bottled in clearwater and vipers tongued a halo on your head. it was terrific. we floated eternal there, untroubled, ecstatic, erupting the present into last november when you dropped the key to lock time. i painted a perimeter around your absence to fill myself in. i dreamed a shimmer on crystals of dust. the ash grew so icy we put on skates and twirled dizzy on the teardrops of saints. in my dream of you there is a train that always never arrives. we get on a carpet of velvet that bitters the air. all the clouds turn grainy, to sand, and funnel the hourglass into a very large vase. i dream of sin, death, apples, the cloak before your end. give me your dream, hand it to me, i want to leave chocolates on the pillow. i will be gone but the sweet will close your eyes and ask you to rest easy. to dream pretty, i tell you one hundred and one times.

I AM THE OTHER FACE OF YOU (2024)

this installation incorporated hand-printed button downs made with desire’s arrangement in mind. the forms were posed in a series of gestures to mimic intimacy, relation, and proximity. the mirrored bodies merge, twine, bind with the intention to approach indecipherability: of language, habitation, and skins.

ALTERATIONS BELOW GROUND (2025)

on christmas day i buried three articles of clothing in my backyard. i dug them up in april, on my 23rd birthday. this experiment was born out of a desire to put dis-ease to rest, through a literal burial of objects that felt to contain a fragment of identity.

t-shirt (my death), nightgown (my life) and dress (my indifference)

this project was a performance of self annihilation and definition. anticipating the material changes that the buried artifacts would endure, i satiated an urge to transcribe the passage of time onto a physical talisman, to witness how past turns to present, and to funnel my own sense of mourning and metamorphosis into a mythologized narrative. clothing appears as a substitute for the phantom figure, bodies outgrown, and skins cast away. after 116 days in the dirt, my death turned gold.

A BODY ONCE: REDACTED (2024)

this project began as a site-specific installation, centering a cardboard cutout of my own body’s silhoutte stamped over repeatedly with the word (redacted). layers of hanging translucent veils obscured the form. strung between the layers were envelopes labeled with messages of censorship, deletion, and eviction. the envelopes contained printed portraits featuring my actual body stamped repeatedly with the word (redacted). as the exhibition was cancelled, the piece never showed.

DO YOU KNOW HOW TO ERODE (2024)

film directed by lily moskowitz and kaden bard dawson.

(transcription) i feel the moments pass through me as wind. the years curl in on themselves. the days arch back. tell me what you’ve dreamt of, i can hold it for you. spill onto me the seams of your head. i dreamt a pool of crinoline. vertebrae, melting. submersion, if you can imagine such a thing. i dream i awaken every blink. blinking minute. i approach the altar and kiss the ground. i think prayer is just poetry, subtract god and a love letter’s all that’s left. i dream you knock twice on this moment and peel back now from then. i wash my hair to gain knowledge of you, i find salt and silence circling the drain. i dream i am the hinge of a dooway. you walk though and collapse. (instrumental).meet me at the boiling point where familiar becomes strange. in your dream you walk barefoot to the loss of that day. the sea was sugar. twilight. streaming slantwise. sleeping again. velvet in the morning. glass in mudpiles. waiting fo the train. if time had no perimeter - if my body could slip from its shell - if i could part the water - i’d remember. everything.