Published
by So What? Press, Timothy Sinaguglia's Crawlspace
is an quietly complex little book that explores both burgeoning
sexuality and the interior life of modern day ennui in two short
vignettes.
Entering
into the cluttered world of Autobio or Confessional Comix, the first
story, “She Smiled Back” unpacks what, for all intents and
purposes, is another artist coming to terms with his own libidinous
awakening. For Sinaguglia, the process was one of exploration
because, as he writes, “in the early nineteen eighties, nobody
talked about sex all that much.” It is as much a harkening back to
the days of pre-internet porn, as it is an expedition into how the
discovery of one's own sexual consciousness can be a significant
moment in understanding one's self. For Sinaguglia, it becomes a
moment fraught with narcissistic overtones, yet also suffused with
questions of gender identity. In “She Smiled Back”, sexuality is
part performance, part imagination, part control, and an
encapsulation of the concept of “division”. Who is the woman who
smiles back, really? And why, out of all the things that Sinaguglia
was discovering on his journey to understanding, was it this act that
led to things finally falling “into place”?
Which
begs larger questions for me. What form does fantasy take in the mind
of an artist? What is he or she really creating and what is the price
of distancing the self from the immediate?
Sinaguglia
explores these final questions a little further in the second
three-part story in Crawlspace,
“Trudy”. “Trudy” follows the movement of the titular
character as she goes... well … basically nowhere. Trudy wanders
into the world in her white t-shirt and black skirt, observing the
bare realities of her experience and making grand statements such as:
“The sky is so black,” “God, it's sweltering,” “I have a
nice window,” and such. She engages the world by commenting on it,
but for the most part she draws no conclusions from the experiences.
