“‘Leavings’ are melancholy doubled. First, leavings are poignant actions: departures, abandonments, desertions. And second, leavings are those things which are left, the remnants of something previously whole: detritus, residue. Each has their own sense of desolation, and in some cases both the action and the remainder are intertwined in a narrative of displacement. This is implied in the residue–whether it be a note, a trace, an object now lost– … Ruptures and cleavings are the subplots of leavings. The departure of things, of wholes, of lives, of loves, leaves the pain of residual stains, of that which remains. The melancholy tracing of things inhere in dust, and in sediments. Like the 'residues of the day’ which, according to Freud, infuse our dreams, leavings are fragmentary and incomplete. Yet within these debris inhere melancholic imaginings, or as Joseph Cornell wrote of the 'sweepings’ that he gathered up from his studio floor, they contain those things that fly under the radar, 'the rich crosscurrents, ramifications, etc., that go into the boxes but which are not apparent in the final result.’”

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