Craw and Close Your Eyes

A Group Show

I find the work exhibited to be bearers of collective reminiscence.

 ‘I’ve been here before’ is a common sensation I experience during my encounters with these pieces. I know the knob of this door at this time of day, I know the hair over her shoulder, I know the reaction, even the shine of this light through my eyelashes in July. It’s the kind of bookmark beauty you want to remember and tell your lover about. Memory and the expression of such varies between a glimpse of realism or sifted elements, reduced to its bones, an ambiguous instant. They are ordinary and fleeting, not seen twice if not for the commemoration in paint or words; a second life is created. The artists in this exhibition achieve conviction in their work by means of the quality and thought-provoking aspects to their depictions.

They make it a point to capture a moment, not strangle but nurture such element. Crawl and Close Your Eyes brings the romantic ordinary into the gallery space. Suggesting snippets of life; its moments and realities through a return to innocence, akin to returning to a memory - impossible in the passage of time. You are left with remnants of what once was. Preserved in a photograph or mental picture- it may live in your house or be the object of another. These are bones and we imagine and remember its body. To crawl and close your eyes is to be submerged in voluntary vulnerability. To relive is voluntary, to retell is vulnerable. It is seizing a memory, it’s a choice to return and retell. Allow this group show to illustrate these ideas, and as a viewer, I ask you; savour the pleasure of the ordinary, what does this leave you with?

RW