I may be sitting in a chair in the living room of Judith Schaechter's Philadelphia townhouse, but I'm not fully there. Almost everywhere. I look, I see a lush world inhabited by imaginary creatures that seem to have flown, slithered, or sprouted from the plates of a book of 19th-century hand-colored engraving, but every living thing has its own personality. Above me, the evening sky is all deep blue washes of various shades of indigo while bird-like creatures circle high overhead. Some fly so close, I can make out varieties with red feathers and intricate patterning, their beaks open and eyes tinged red, whether with anger or angst, it's hard to tell. The celestial scene is broken up both by the copper-foil lines of the stained glass and also the larger supporting structure of wooden beams arranged into a dome of hexagons, with stained-glass stars marking their points of intersection. And that's just what's above my head.
Around me, the walls erupt with plant and insect species I've never seen before, but are familiar for their heavy shading and languorous poses, weighed down by gravity or some type of exhaustion. There is so much atmosphere to this landscape: how a spider watches its prey dangling in its web, framed by the silhouetted tendrils of a vine, the quality of light achieved through the controlled mediation of colored glass ground away to create a portentious cast of luminescence. A lot is happening in this fertile mid layer; there is too much to take in at once, and so you surrender to the atmosphere of busy propagation, of cycles repeating; you can almost hear the din of the insects in the tropical night.
Meanwhile, the nearly opaque lower level is like a cross-section of the earth, the cutaway revealing layers of skulls, roots, and larvae incubating, just waiting to burst through the surface. It is an uneasy quiet compared to aboveground, but with no less potent a sense of intrigue, and a fragile balance between the quiescent and the unsettling. New life gestates, fertilized by what has come before, the decay of lived experience nourishing what comes next, for good or evil, for better or worse, the cycles of life itself.
