The Improbable Outside

Nicholas Thompson Gallery, 28 February to 18 March 2018

In the introduction of Architecture from the Outside (2000), Elizabeth Grosz refers to the outside as "the place one can never occupy fully or completely, for it is always other, different, at a distance from where one is." (Grosz, 2000, p.16) She talks about the unexpected and liberating joy of "outsideness" as being able to see what one might not be able to see from the inside. Grosz's proposition is not particularly comforting or reassuring, but it is alluring and it appeals to the utopian imaginary. This group of paintings occupies an affectual reckoning of Grosz's "outsideness". In the process of making these works I've tried to hover somewhere else for a while, in a state of unknowing, to make paintings in a more intuitive way. There are associations with works I've made in the past but the connections are casual and have become obscured.