DELIA CADMAN . CLUB

2025
2022-2024

WINDOWS SCAFFOLDS AND VISIONS OF EXCESS 2025
THE SUNSHINE OF PARADISE ALLEY 2024

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Delia Cadman is a Brooklyn based interdisciplinary sculptor. Born and raised in the heart of New York’s theater district their work draws on early childhood experiences of dance and theater, especially the “backstage,” and research regarding the history of the Times Square neighborhood. Their work explores embodiment, transgression, opacity and gaze, through a research based compulsive, archival and anthropological lens. 

  • How does the pursuit of ecstasy through non-knowledge, negation, and rupture (disorientation) reveal the limits of being and experience? How can the erotic, the criminal, the sacred and the profane function as a means of approaching that limit?
  • How can criminality reveal the limits of morality especially as morality is co- opted as a justification for surveillance / control?
  • How can the fracturing effect of depression and other mental disorders mimic anarchy? And what does this mimicry teach us about our innate capacity for unlearning hierarchy through dissolution?
  • Can the fracturing effect of depression and other mental disorders or, coversely, anarchy be reproduced through an object which is "bare bones?"
  • How can veiling, blurring, selective self-censorship, and ephemerality function as modes of resistance against the regulations and oversight imposed by governments, institutions, and systems of control and their underlying ideologies of hierarchy, cohesion, clarification, and categorization?
  • What does veiling / stripping reveal about the pleasure of opacity and maybe even an erotic necessity for it? 
  • How can constellation, collection, proposition and iteration function as forms of abstraction which remain open and unresolved? And what is the ethical significance of this irresolution as a driving force (contrasted with more normative values of security, constancy, and fulfillment)? 
  • Irresolution / impotence? Pleasure in failure, risk, negation, and suspended resolution. The good lack.
  • How does gambling act as a concrete, ritualized practice of suspended resolution and what does this suspended resolution reveal about forms of being (and being-with) structured around risk, repetition, and “anti-productive” expenditure?
  • A wager against meaning -- risk coherence to achieve intensity? 
  • How is the appropriation of found language and/or objects an effect of yearning to merge with, consume, or be consumed?
  • Divinity not as benevolence but an impersonal totality. 
  • If desire is the only way to know, and knowing is always destructive, then can practice resist “communication,” and instead be a communion with the unknowable -- an act of worship conducted through ruin, pleasure, desolation, encounter, and exhaustion?
  • Is it possible to stage “reality” without spectacle? Or to subvert spectacle by exposing it? 

Delia is a current MFA sculpture student at Bard College. They received a BFA from Cooper Union in 2021. Since then they have been a member of Trestle Art Space in Brooklyn. Recent exhibitions of their work include the solo exhibition The Sunshine of Paradise Alley at Trestle Art Space (Brooklyn, NY; 2024), as well as group exhibitions Moral Injury at Hercules Studio Program (New York, NY; 2024), Shimmering Bodies at Millennium Film Workshop (Brooklyn, NY; 2024), and Summer Brew at Field Projects (Online; 2024). Also in 2024, they were awarded the Dedalus Art Foundation Project Grant for their SHOW WORLD CENTER performance and installation piece. They are the founder and lead organizer of the project space CLUBLAND COUNTERFEIT.


Because the appropriation, corruption, and recontextualization of found language is central to my practice, it seems fitting that these borrowed passages serve as my “artist statement.” 

The first excerpt, taken from Maurice Blanchot’s essay Sade, is, as the title suggests, Blanchot’s analysis of the work of the Marquis de Sade. In this essay, Blanchot describes Sade’s concept of crime and cruelty as existential rather than moral. For Sade, the greatest crime is not impulsive or passionate, but cold, premeditated, and deliberate. In such an act, the individual destroys within themselves all capacity for feeling and identification, turning their insensibility into a form of immense power. The libertine is terrifying because they no longer seek pleasure-- they have destroyed pleasure-- and instead ruthlessly pursue horror and annihilation as the only remaining forms of intensity. Sade’s text enacts rather than defends this thesis through the deliberate, precise, and rational contruction of language which fails even in its exhaustive volume, to adequately contain or express the the excesses and absences that preoccupy him.

The second excerpt is drawn from Moby-Dick by Herman Melville, which likely needs no introduction. Notoriously chimerical, broken down, is a book that grapples with the limits of knowledge through both its form (epic, poetic, philosophical, scientific, and elusively pornographic) and narrative (allegoric encounter with the unknown and the unknowable). Melville’s prose, not unlike Sade’s, oscillates between precision and delirium, the empirical, the exhaustive, and the ecstatic. The selected passage is a description of the ship’s carpenter: a figure whose labor, being entirely of-this-world and material, is paradoxically metaphysical. His craft is one of being through non-being-- a physicalized annihilation of self through object (identifying oneself as object and all other objects by extension), in which individual consciousness becomes both all and none though its dissolution into the matter that it produces.

Combined, these fragments approach a description of my practice and preoccupations. They situate my practice within a lineage of thinkers and artists for whom desire is the foundation of an erotics of thought, which demands, as if by divine law, that attempts to unveil a core truth always fail. Truth becomes more obscure the more it is illuminated. 






Not only his work but his thinking remains impenetrable-and this in spite of the fact that both abound in detailed theories, which he expounds and repeats over and over again with disconcerting patience, and in spite of the fact that he reasons with impeccable clarity and not inconsiderable logic. He has a penchant-and even a passion for systems. He expounds and affirms and offers proof; he comes back to the same problem a hundred times over (and a hundred is a conservative figure), he studies it from every angle, he considers every possible objection and answers them all, then manages to come up with some further objections and replies to them as well.

And since what he says is usually simple enough, since his language is rich but precise and firm, it would seem that nothing should be more simple in dealing with [...] than to elucidate the ideology which, in his case, is inseparable from passion. And yet, what is the gist of [...] 's thought? What in fact did he say? What is the scheme, the order of this system? Where does it begin and where does it end? Is there, indeed, more than the shadow of a system in the probing of this mind, so obsessed as it is with reason? And why is it that so many well co-ordinated principles fail to form the solid whole which they ought to and which, at least on the surface, they in fact seem to? That too remains unclear. Such is the first peculiar characteristic of [...] : his theories and ideas are constantly generating and unleashing irrational forces to which they are bound. These forces simultaneously animate and thwart the theories, in such a way that the theories resist at first but then eventually yield; they seek to dominate the insurgent force, hnally do, but only atter they have unleashed other obscure forces, which bear the theories further along, deflect them from their course, and distort them. The result is that everything which is said is clear, but seems to be at the mercy of something left unsaid, and a little later on what has not been explicitly stated does indeed appear and is reintegrated by logic; but then this in its turn succumbs to the influence of some other, still hidden force, until finally everything is expressed, is revealed, but also everything is plunged back again into the obscurity of unformulated and inexpressible thoughts. 1





For nothing was this man more remarkable, than for a certain impersonal stolidity as it were; impersonal, I say; for it so shaded off into the surrounding infinite of things, that it seemed one with the general stolidity discernible in the whole visible world; which while pauselessly active in uncounted modes, still eternally holds its peace, and ignores you, though you dig foundations for cathedrals. Yet was this half-horrible stolidity in him, involving, too, as it appeared, an all-ramifying heartlessness;-yet was it oddly dashed at times, with an old, crutch-like, antediluvian, wheezing humorousness, not unstreaked now and then with a certain grizzled wittiness; such as might have served to pass the time during the midnight watch on the bearded forecastle of Noah's ark. Was it that this old carpenter had been a life-long wanderer, whose much rolling, to and fro, not only had gathered no moss; but what is more, had rubbed off whatever small outward clingings might have originally pertained to him? He was a stript abstract; an unfractioned integral; uncompromised as a new-born babe; living without premeditated reference to this world or the next. You might almost say, that this strange uncompromisedness in him involved a sort of unintelligence; for in his numerous trades, he did not seem to work so much by reason or by instinct, or simply because he had been tutored to it, or by any intermixture of all these, even or uneven; but merely by a kind of deaf and dumb, spontaneous literal process. He was a pure manipulator; his brain, if he had ever had one, must have early oozed along into the muscles of his fingers. He was like one of those unreasoning but still highly useful, multum in parvo, Sheffield contrivances, assuming the exterior-though a little swelled-of a common pocket knife; but containing, not only blades of various sizes, but also screw-drivers, cork-screws, tweezers, awls, pens, rulers, nail-filers, countersinkers. So, if his superiors wanted to use the carpenter for a screw-driver, all they had to do was to open that part of him, and the screw was fast: or if for tweezers, take him up by the legs, and there they were.

Yet, as previously hinted, this omnitooled, open-and-shut carpenter, was, after all, no mere machine of an automaton. If he did not have a common soul in him, he had a subtle something that somehow anomalously did its duty. What that was, whether essence of quicksilver, or a few drops of hartshorn, there is no telling. But there it was; and there it had abided for now some sixty years or more. And this it was, this same unaccountable, cunning life-principle in him; this it was, that kept him a great part of the time soliloquizing; but only like an unreasoning wheel, which also hummingly soliloquizes; or rather, his body was a sentry-box and this soliloquizer on guard there, and talking all the time to keep himself awake. 2



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