SYZYGY is the alignment of celestial bodies and a darkening eclipse. The term eclipse is derived from the ancient Greek noun (ekleipsis), which means “the darkening of a heavenly body”.
“Eyes, days, door, the old country. Eagle eyes, a thousand days old”. – Unica Zürn, Ermenonville 1957
Speaking from a position of division, conscious and unconscious, Dark Springs gush forth with new alignments, re-wired and hurled right back at the heavens. Stars align and separate, line up and implode, shattering, refracting, dark into light, daze into night, and back again.
Unica Zürn – disarticulated, dismembered and reconfigured by her lover and collaborator Hans Bellmer – tore up her sad lovely doodle drawings, and Bellmer stuck them back together…is it better to be scattered and broken? It doesn’t quite line up.
In this exhibition, the principles of Unica Zürn’s anagrammatic poems and images are repurposed and re-routed.
Petra William’s figures emerge from darkness, blush through the paint, gazed upon by the viewer, to ask intrepidly if they look upon themselves or are within their own being. These paintings talk about relationships and creating one’s own space, being together or being in a void.
Vicky Wright re-routes a woozy painterliness into anti-portraits, in order to consider what the idea of self is. Figures and faces luminesce and hover, composed from disarticulated swatches, riffed from the history of painting and digital culture into morphing psychological states. The terminal points between being and landscape, the exterior and the internally experienced. The energies reside inside herself and they know something that she doesn’t.
Forms explode in the guttural mark making of Josephine Wood’s paintings. Here, animalistic forms collide with interior objects such as tables and lamps, crushing the boundaries between subject and object. Titles such as ‘The Subject is Split’ allude to a divided subjectivity, suspended between desire and abjection, the sensory body and conventions of language.
Wood’s images kick up a storm in Expressionism’s teacup and land aside the monumental wonder of Tracy Owusu’s heavily textured, statuesque portraits of imagined figures, fluent with birds and animals, poised in arresting presence. Surrogates of lost history on a grand scale, her griots capture the zeitgeist, reflecting a fragmented idealism of blackness, otherness, historical ambiguity and aesthetic dandyism.
Owusu’s patchwork symphony of reimagined archives, reveal liquid methodologies, and collide with the colour saturated archival photographs of Sadie Murdoch’s ink-jet printed digital montages. Murdoch’s plastic and layered spaces operate in the field of power and absence, via the partial, the incomplete, the crop and the edit. Dadaist poets and modernist muses, lost in a scopic space where all cuts are the deepest.
Dark Spring -syzygy- press release
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