Gravity Gallery – North Adams Massachusetts 2024

June 7th 2024

Like meticulously studied and designed patterns of eye movements, there are social worlds around us that we can’t see but that might influence our own. I think about the metaphor of the “beast” in contemporary life and the habits or predictive movements we imagine when we move our bodies to dodge or wrestle them. What have we been tricked into sacrificing? In what ways do we trick ourselves into thinking we have control?

While I keep a critical eye on constructed or designed experiences, I am sensitive to the memories my body holds of larger-scale machines that have become ingrained in the way we imagine movement (e.g., planes and cars). Can standardized movements show up in dreams? Wishing I had an HD memory (while knowing this is impossible), I consider the ways I am disoriented and how I trick myself into thinking I understand clearly. I think about modes of viewing: manipulating a gaze, designing a gaze, a gaze that is predatory (even predatory against oneself), and a calculating gaze. Can a painting and a body release themselves from the gaze by gazing only at themselves? Even in this case, a painting trades itself to itself, winning and losing, creating and ultimately destroying.

-text by Alex Close