Agatha Gothe-Snape and Wrong Solo: Certain Situations

EXHIBITION GUIDE

This four-gallery solo exhibition by Agatha Gothe-Snape and Wrong Solo features new and newly reimagined artworks spanning video, binaural sound, sculpture, poetry, performance, drawing, and installation. A series of psychic spaces provide an apparatus for processing fragmentary encounters, movements, feelings, and states of consciousness. Ordinary situations and chance-based chains of events are methodically worked through, allowing meaning—however tenuous—to be extracted from the layers of disguise found in dreams, language, and other symbolic conventions. What might otherwise be viewed as inadvertent becomes significant. This sense of equivalency is not just a strategy for flattening or reordering established hierarchies, but for understanding and examining lesser known situations, objects, people, places, and histories. The archive, including the institution or studio-as-archive, is used to trace and register the complex web of actors that govern the relationships between things. However, the singular authority of the archive is often troubled: the practice of self-archiving allows for idiosyncratic hierarchies of information; what or who is recalled is only as important as what is left out; and recollections frequently give way to false memories, dreams, or fictions. Perhaps, then, it is the process or act of remembering that is more important. The spaces of art—from the desk to the studio, the rehearsal space, and the gallery—are organised as mnemonic devices; memory palaces that open the interior space of the psyche out into public view. The parameters of physical spaces make for fluid associations: an opening is an entry is an exit. And the external world gives cues to enter an internal one: to close the eyes, to listen, to observe one’s own position.