SMCK ON REEL

2022 / All artists

SIMON MARCUS SWALE


Charms, 2022. Powder coated aluminum.    Photo: S.M. Swale.




La Notte

This work attempts to capture something of the global Covid-19 pandemic, to capture in the moment something of its atmosphere. The experience of living in the time of a global pandemic has disrupted perhaps not just our lives, but our very sense of a life. Like some contemporary Divine Comedy, we all exist, waiting, in some form of purgatory for this nightmare to end.

Time itself seems somehow altered. Time seems suspended beyond our usual experiences. Lockdowns situate us in a perpetual present, waiting and hoping. We seem stuck in what Maurice Blanchot calls an ‘unbearable present’; "a present without end and yet impossible as a present."

This work is in memoriam to those who have passed and those who have survived. A memento to all who have endured – and for what has been endured – it is made in the belief that after this dark night will come a new dawn.

"La Notte" - video, 2021.

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