Group exhibition / RESIDUAL HISTORIES Opening night, 6 – 8 pm Thursday 14 August Open until 5 pm Sunday 7 September Curated by Annelies Jahn
Never Seen Essay by Lisa Pang
There’s a feeling that washes over (you may know it) on returning to a once familiar place after having been away for some time. The place may feel smaller, less imposing, more rounded, less crisp than your memory would have you believe. Expected details are aberrant, glitched, unexpected. It is an unsettling feeling, even alienating, for a homecoming, a sensation that has been described as jamais vu. As if during your absence, your familiar place accumulated agency. Your memory-asresidue settled like dust in the corners, among other unknown possibilities. For visual artists, the familiar place might be a set of routines by which they go about their work - favoured materials, known processes, a hummed melody. These familiarities set up a continuum of making, so the thing that is made – the artwork – once seen, is recognised as unfamiliar to its maker. Arriving at something once known but anew, and askew, is to be open to the unfamiliar and in a way, to look for the never seen. In this way, Residual Histories is an exhibition defined less by exactness of intention and more by the vagaries of unintention; where marks and forms arise out of the fog of what-if, doubt, play, and experimentation. The works are drawn in a way that is somewhat tremulous, often playful, impetuous, with the precarity of mark-making hovering between design and accident. There is a provisional quality to them, as if they are suspended in a moment, and they may be, or may not be, finished works. This might be unsettling, but in a good way, sitting in that expansive gap between the sensory and the intellectual. Working with a sort of knowing unknowing is a way of uncovering the residual, visual, stories that move us. Annelies Jahn, the curator of Residual Histories speaks of this exhibition holding aside a compelling space for those things that happen ‘to the side of what we think is the work’. She has assembled six artists, herself included, around the question, ‘how does placing the self into process deliver us into artmaking?’ There is a point at which process transforms materials into art, but for Jahn the far more interesting (and ambiguous) moment, as well as answering her question, is the one where process and materials reveal things that could easily have remained hidden, and the artist chooses to stop there. In terms of drawing, this is a moment of observation rather than of purpose, requiring a state of openness, and the