When I was a kid I spent a lot of time hanging out in the fire stairs of my apartment building making different sounds with my voice and listening to them echo back to me. I imagined that behind the walls there was another planet that was a mirror image of this one. There were a few echo places around town where I knew I could go to talk to the other me.

Now that I live outside of the city, I notice other kinds of echoes, like how each tree in a forest is growing a forest worth of seeds. Or how the eggs that made us formed in our mothers while their bodies formed in our grandmothers. We all reverberate in so many ways.

I think we’re all born twins, dreaming each other into being. I’ve seen diagrams of astral projection where the sleeping person splits into two identical forms. Their dreaming body floats off like a vapor and travels around tethered to them by an energetic cord so it doesn’t get lost.

I’ve never seen a picture of what it looks like when the bodies merge again, but maybe when we’re awake, our other body sits inside us following all our movements and when our outer hands touch something in the world, our inner hands touch something in ourselves.

–Jesse Cohen

Marley Freeman (b. 1981) is a Brooklyn-based artist whose work can be considered a marginal type of abstraction born of a desire and pursuit of difference, which draws on a history with textiles. After working in the decorative arts in Southern California and New York, Marley went on to pursue painting, earning a BFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and an MFA from Bard College’s Milton Avery School of the Arts. Recent exhibitions include Monday is a Day Between Sunday and Tuesday, curated by Lisa Offermann, Tanya Leighton, Berlin; Whatever Moves Between Us also Moves the World in General, Murray Guy, NYC; A Summer Painting Show, PSM, Berlin; Decision 2015 (I Change), Cleopatra’s, NYC; Cards for Porcino at Chert/Porcino, Berlin, organized by David Horvitz; Onion by the Ocean, Underdonk Brooklyn, NYC; Syntagma, curated by Natasha Lorens, the New School, NYC; 247365, NYC; and Kansas Gallery, NYC.