Chloe Hagger and Anabel Robinson, 'Angela and the Sorgenkinds'.

23 Sept - 9 Oct 2023

A peculiar show at a peculiar time; Bel and Chloe vaguely slouch towards each other, barely coexisting in the mundane bareness we’ve all been conditioned to laud. Laud because we’re myopic or unoriginal, or maybe just because we actually believe it’s the best we deserve. Horizontality, levelling out a cluttered space, performing vitality to subsist or just get by. A scene is a stage and all your friends are actors. I don’t know what a picture of Myles in a messy room says to a synaptic bolt of black, Je ne sais quoi. Anabel’s lines are direct but random, her composition sparse but terse. The constellations of spray painted pencils and various brushed pointed ovals miraculously avoid forming any cogent associations, yet somehow straddle the edges of what feel like references. The canvas bears countless little scuffs and marks, colliding and mingling with each other to create united bold features. Negative space is complicated to the point of optical illusion in some points of particularly tremendous tension. The markings feel organic and atmospheric, but not so much as to distract or labour the point of their ambience. Je ne sais quoi, I don’t know. Myopia. I guess we’re on the precipice of change? Post Guzzler, post Meow, post everything that’s happened and hasn’t happened. Post a time that called for something serious, maybe just now gone. Is this show emblematic of some future or some past? Something is being lamented, commiserating a loss of innocence — but it’s not a fresh wound. Not an autopsy, but like a wake or like a birthday. Something is bubbling under the surface. Angst. Commiseration. A ritual for past time and times passed. Pathological or mythological, I don’t know. Myles stares at whatever it is he’s working on, sitting there, kind of awkwardly, and sweetly, on the ground in front of a messy assemblage of musical instruments, art supplies, and general sharehouse clutter. This scene is so familiar it's almost cliché. Chloe has a way of staging people with unconventional stage presences. Maybe it’s just patience, giving her subject the space to sprawl out. Somewhere between rehearsed and spontaneous the image has a blog-ish sensibility, a lived aesthetic is captured in a moment that unveils it and leaves it standing on its own, unadorned and sheepish and embarrassing. The boundary between real and pretend is destroyed when you live life beautifully. The artifice of style is appended to the virtue of truth, but it’s kind of tragic when you catch a glimpse of the fiction in yourself in isolation — the fiction implicit in our outwardly facing personae looks funny and weird when decoupled from the stage it’s normally performed on. Bel and Chloe’s work is expressive, but not self-exclamatory. They are subjects that are not subjected. Auteurs that do not self-mythologise. They are style. They do not mine their subjectivity for content, they are experiencing it expressively. It’s cynical to call bullshit on earnest expression, on tender emotions, even naivety, so if you don’t agree, that’s valid, but at least be real. This world doesn’t happen to them, they just happen in this world. They have Je ne sais quoi. I don’t think they know either. Sometimes you look at a friend in their messy home and something inside you just snaps. Like heartbreak, but kind of joie de vivre. Not every thought has to be complete. Not everyone suffers from their ailments. The opposite of disillusionment is not an illusion. Singular moments punctuate Asbestos with explosive gusto, but quietly, like don’t look away, you might just miss it. An ouroboros in the making, a glottal stop, anxiously waiting to violently rupture a surface like I don’t know. Like I don’t know like I don’t know like the artist’s room is like a little cave of love. Electrifying beauty grips the imagination and just keeps pouring out. This feeling is real, the red is intense, the sunshine heals but it’s blinding. A synapse prunes itself in anticipation of a familiar shock. Change happens slowly. Everything new hurts.


Text by Yuval Rosinger