Little Do, Little Oh

It’s good to be neuter.

             I want to have meaningless legs.

                          There are things unbearable.

                                       One can evade them a long time.

Then you die.

The ocean reminds me

             of your green room.

                          There are things unbearable.

                                       Scorn, princes, this little size

of dying.

My personal poetry is a failure.

             I do not want to be a person.

                          I want to be unbearable.

                                       Lover to lover, the greenness of love.

Cool, cooling.

Earth bears no such plant.

             Who does not end up

                          a female impersonator?

                                       Drink all the sex there is.

Still die.

I tempt you.

             I blush.

                         There are things unbearable.

                                      Legs, alas.

Legs die.

Rocking themselves down,

             crazy slow,

                          some ballet term for it —

                                       fragment of foil, little

spin,

             little drunk,

                          little do,

                                       little oh,

                                                    alas.

(Stanzas, Sexes, Seductions. Anne Carson)

Tyler Park Presents is pleased to announce Little Do, Little Oh, Jessica Palermo’s first solo exhibition in Los Angeles. The exhibition will take place from September 13 - October 25, 2025 (Extended to November 7, 2025) with a reception from 5 - 8pm on Saturday, September 13.

Jessica Palermo’s work lingers on fleeting moments through depictions of places, figures, flora, and objects, tracing their beauty even as they slip into impermanence. Inspired by Anne Carson’s ‘Stanzas, Sexes, Seductions’, Palermo’s new group of paintings unfold like verses - self contained yet tethered by an emotional undercurrent of desire, dislocation, and beauty on the verge of collapse. The exhibition title, Little Do, Little Oh, is drawn from Carson’s final stanza, an invocation of fleeting gestures and transient sensations.

Throughout the exhibition, layering and shifts in perspective introduce a constant play of dualities and oppositions, as if the surface oscillates between presence and absence, intimacy and distance. In this way, Palermo seeks to hold onto fragments of the past, even as they continue their passage toward disappearance. Curtains, windows, and doorways invite the viewer close but stop short of resolution. Flowers are painted with tenderness and decay, legs languid and fragmented. Interior scenes hinting at the beginning, or ending, of a private moment; light lingering long enough to be tempting. These scenes resist linearity, folding anticipation and aftermath into a single image. Frames within frames echo Carson’s logic - each work whole in itself, yet part of a larger conversation regarding the intricate nature of seduction and the ephemerality of being mortal. The paintings aim to lure the viewer in, through high contrast and compositions that recede in space. But what is alluring and what are our limitations in expressing it? Such is the problem with allure, it can’t escape temporality, and subsequent mortality, any more than we can escape our own personal poetry. This body of work holds these contradictions in suspension, asking us to dwell in the tension between the pull of the here-and-now, and the inevitability of change.

Jessica Palermo (b. 1984 Henderson, NV) lives and works in Los Angeles. She holds a B.A. in Interdisciplinary Studies from the University of California, Berkeley. Her inaugural solo exhibition titled The Pull took place at Smoke the Moon in Santa Fe, New Mexico in 2024. Her work has been included in group exhibitions at venues such as Sargent’s Daughters, Los Angeles; Various Small Fires, Dallas; Good Naked, New York; and Smoke The Moon, Santa Fe.