Opening: 2 September, 6—9pm
 
 
 
The exhibition includes a set of performances and talks.
 
9 September, 7.30pm
Performing a talk by Daniel Shanken and Benjamin Orlow
 
13 September, 8pm
Lovers' dinner
Places are strictly limited. Please book by emailing info@almanacprojects.com
 
16 September, 7.30pm
Evensong
performances by Hannah Catherine Jones
and Nina Wakeford
 
24 September, 1—6pm
Lovers’end
 
 
 
It is an inverted possibility, making the medium of painting into a relational ethics for the contemporary moment. The individual works are involved in this propagation through an alchemical politics.
If there was another mirror in Alice's drawing room - would that tripled space have come close to the complexity and contradictions of contemporary life? The imagery of the not-so-distant past repeats a practice of attention disguised as interiority, and the object of bad taste is a warning that all is not as it should be. When we look closely at the painting’s surface, we may discover a portal through the personal into a new outward-facing language.
Perhaps the distorting mirror/screen acts as a spirit animal for the modern - the digital cricket on our shoulder whose background noise we can learn to decipher as a shift in scale. The painting gazes out at us with the eyes of an insect, revealing a multidimensional alternate space.
By breaking out of the sphere, embracing the fragility of our own perception, a chimera is formed that gestures across the schism of languages that could have been, an oasis of impossibilities that is fruitful in the acknowledgement of the darkness of the unconscious.
The weight of history is held back by a spider’s web filigree of surfaces, and the constant care of the witch-gardener releases the chemicals of negative consumption, allowing for the articulation of the depth of emotions into a plane. If humans can create emotional thresholds, so can paintings. And after all, the work itself has crossed many thresholds to reach this stage.
The love we have for the busts of reality that prop us up, help us function, and build on invisible lives, gather and call for a response. The husbands and wives of painters are frozen into casts of their love for the world, worked in to the surfaces and stimulating swirls of material.
Becoming-with-painting, unhelpful judgments fall away like shedded skins. A raw thought places itself on the surface of this relation, a paper napkin absorbing the viciousness that surrounds it, turning shadow.
 
 
Astrid Korporaal