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Jordan Casteel: The thing that I saw first above all else was the way that the arm seemed to flutter as the person or the body is carrying another.

Narrator: Artist Jordan Casteel describes her first encounter with this drawing.

Jordan Casteel: And at the moment of connection between the two, there’s real conflation of bodies, you can’t really tell what’s what. And, at the same time, you can see it all and understand what’s happening.

It’s almost life-size. And that in of itself, I think is also a very telling and poignant capacity that Jennifer has in her ability to draw you into very minute moments. I want to understand what that kind of more opaque hand is doing. There’s a finger that is bent, that is really holding the weight of this drawing. Everything starts and ends with that hand. And then it distills out from it. I feel like it holds the entire truth and then behind that, you begin to try to understand what the relationship is, the sense of play and complexity. If we think about vulnerability in the work, which comes up a lot, this is another moment for me, where I began to understand with more clarity, her capacity, of making us understand something without giving us everything.