Dirt in the Eye

In the room images look at each other. In this mimetic chamber, the everyday is reflected. Bouncing from one piece to another, blinking codes of mundanities are obscured. Whether through shadowy pencil-work or bricolage, frames of routine are stretched onto their own material boundaries. The microdot of the i darts between retina and primary visual cortex, vibrating somewhere between the symbolic and imaginary—these data of everyday scenes are dirtied at the cornea, mutating instead their banal prosaic into homonymic Prozac.

Like the wormlike floaters one can see when looking at a white wall—tucked into the corneas’ lubricated movements— these unremarkable beings are always there but only noticed when paid attention to. And as we pull our focus onto these wiggles of information out of place—everything else becomes peripheral. The eye starts to see itself, as the eye sees itself in the dot of the i.

In Polly Plowden’s “Room”, a room unfolds from sheets of paper, sublimating and mobilising a routine spectacle of light. From another room with a window, a dark view of fiercely crashing waves is captured in Anna Clegg’s graphite mercurial drawings. In Tasneem Sarkez’s “A Lion’s Words” we are asked whether we are brave enough to tell the Lion that his breath stinks; and as we close in on this symbolic lion in text, the eye catches glimpses of itself in the polished metal.

Steganographic conspiracy may typically entertain us on how to look at these pieces, but punctuated mundanity acts as a guardrail for us to lean on. Without being too caught up on decoding abstractions, we can float through a white cube designated for looking. We seek respite from the unremarkable existence of the i by building systems of routine. By occupying it as a witness, we make the gallery uncomfortable, ultimately becoming ourselves—specks of dirt in the eye.

written by Carl Gustaf Von Platen