As the exhibitions at Anise Gallery have come to a halt during the coronavirus pandemic, I’ve been working on a bi-monthly column for the gallery’s blog to reflect on the role of art in these strange times and also consider the work of some of our artists from within this new context.
The two first posts have gone live. Check them out below.
You can read the introductory post, “Art in Isolation”, here…
Anise Gallery, like so many other galleries and cultural institutions, has found itself rethinking its plans for the future during the Coronavirus outbreak. Our exhibition programme for the next six months has, unsurprisingly, been disrupted, but it might also allow us to reflect on why we do some of the things we do.
…And the latest post, “Eerie Architecture”, here.
For centuries, even millennia, ruins such as these have served as fuel for the imagination. Today, however, and increasingly so, they unnerve us, being as much a warning of a possible future as they are a sign of what has gone before. Our awareness of our own precarity on the lands on which we walk provides us with a thrill that is perverse but universal. To stumble across an environment that betrays the signs of a former use is to stumble across a simulation of the world without us. It is to both be a ghost and to walk among them; to be a presence within absence.