Abella d'Adamo, Edward Dean, George Egerton-Warbuton, Caesar Florence-Howard, Claire Lambe & Brayden van Meurs, 'Full of Love and Contradiction'.
26 Jun - 10 Jul 2021
You’re here again, trying to find the entrance; a door, manhole, vault, grate, a portal, whatever it is. You know its somewhere near here, the garden next to the building full of golden ingots. Steel platelets course through veins beneath your feet, their vibrations forming a hypnotic rhythm, moving like tardigrades in the body of the city. You can feel the presence of the membrane, yourself a blade on the edge of incision. You find the threshold nestled in a pile of dead leaves under the naked branches of a London Plane tree and claw at the leaves with desperation, revealing a pattern in metal with each autumnal scrape. Concentric circles spliced with lines spaced 15° apart populate the full 360°, contained by a thin framing line 10mm from the border of the surface. Perpendicular lines 5mm from one another accent the border. All the lines - circular, straight, and angular - are engraved less than a mm deep into the metal face, forming the image of a target. The image seems instructional: a demand. Its face holds your focus, consuming your vision as the world dissipates from your peripherals. The staring sends you deeper, until all illusions of surface give way to cascade. You’re shocked to your senses by the feeling of falling, the type of jolt you experience just as your mind attempts to pollinate your brain with dream images. You can see what’s beneath and you know it’s there - the target has told you. You remember what you’re here to do. You meant to bring a tool of some kind, something to lever the target up, to displace it. You’ve forgotten it though and you’re forced to improvise. You fumble for a card in your wallet to pry open the latch, pushing an expired gift card into the gap. Flicking and sliding the card back and forth, you feel a pre-perspirant itch burn across your back. On the verge of defeat, you hear a click, and wedge the card in on an absurd angle, trying to lift the metal with both hands, but only get as much as a glance at the opaque hum of subterranean light before the card shatters. The weight of the metal pulls you down as it slams shut, reconnecting the valve with its lip. The London planes tower over as if they’re laughing, and you can’t help but feel dejected. Staring at the face of the entrance, the central circle where all lines converge seems to stare back. We lock eyes for a time. In the reflection of its pupil, you picture another biome, with rats, rubbish, rot, wires, steel and blinding light, all harmonising with the regular throb of your organs.