Jason Nelson makes claims that he isn’t a musician. I am deprived of the physical ability to play an instrument, he says: I only manipulate preexisting sound. And yet, one of the most striking things about his new work Plush and indeed about much of his work in general, is the spacious use of sound.

Plush is a hypertextish flash piece; by that I mean that it follows the hypertext logic (it is primarily a textual and still image object, accessible via an interface that allows the user to read the texts and images in a non-sequential, nonhierarchical order); user-interaction is encapsulated in navigational choice. This logic, around the early to mid-nineties, was quite a leap; it challenged the purported linearity of the book, and the politics surrounding it: hierarchy, authorial control, etc. etc.

In the hands of a lesser artist, this technique would seem dated. But when I think of Nelson’s work, I think of candy–not in the pejorative sense, as in the dismissive “eye-candy,” but in the sense of a cleanness of architecture, a clearness of design. Nelson here is raiding the annals of Pop aesthetic; the pieces opening frame contains both work-title and author-name in a figure reminiscent of brand logos, which is definitely not to suggest any alignment of Nelson with corporate artworks: Nelson’s underground, albeit he is an artist quite interested in the traditional aspirations toward beauty and wholeness.

Naturally, this is not as simple as it seems; the resonances Nelson sets up between the image of the towel (a soft, enveloping world) and the individuals who inhabit them (for drying, for comfort) are at the heart of these prose poems. All through her reading, the user is soothed by a repetitive musical phrase, against which at times smaller flash documents radiate from the interface; in some, a voice sings about domestic objects: toothbrushes, socks; that which clings to our body and defines it in its relations to the space. Nelson’s vocal clips are verses in a complex song that also incorporates images and alternating transmogrifying text.

These are images of nudity mostly, body parts (presumably of Sondheim and his wife Azure Carter) magnified and (at least in the beginning of the image-sentence) cut off from context: penis and vagina, sphincter and buttocks, gracefully moving from close-up to full-body shots (the Sondheims are photographed draped across the sheet-covered back of a sofa). Each photograph is accompanied by Sondheim’s text, which is, predictably, about text. The images and the text both mesh and contrast; one gets the feeling that when Sondheim writes of text, he is writing also of the body, and that his theory encompasses both, not necessarily making a distinction between the two.

Nelson’s musicianship consist in his ability to carve a delicious three-minute pop song from these elements. Not the song that the radio station streams to you over and over, but one that you compose along with him, thereby fusing your own aspirations to his musings on the domestic. Nelson’s domestic is our pop. It tastes good.