💥✍ 𝔸𝕣𝕥 𝕘𝕒𝕝𝕝𝕖𝕣𝕚𝕖𝕤 𝕒𝕣𝕖 𝕔𝕝𝕠𝕤𝕖𝕕 𝕗𝕠𝕣 𝕠𝕧𝕖𝕣 𝕒 𝕨𝕖𝕖𝕜 𝕕𝕦𝕖 𝕥𝕠 𝕥𝕙𝕖 𝕡𝕒𝕟𝕕𝕖𝕞𝕚𝕔. The night's city lights find their way through the glass ceiling of the art institution, to fall down down down into the atrium, where a moth flits here & there & up up up like a fist of fossilised news sheets. A light flickers in one of the first-floor galleries & the moth punches to the right to alight on a wall & unclinch. Flicker, flicker, flicker, the light goes on & goes off, illuminating one husk of an object among a graveyard of others set at eye-level on the gallery walls as far as the moth's eye can see in the flickering darkness. The moth lays there in constant low-level anxiety, heaving under the winking light's attraction but unwilling to get lost in the drift of darkness. Under the beating light a synaptic fire flickers in the moth, bright in association & dark in sentiment, as the parts of the image that comprise the photographic plate that comprises most of the husk behind which the flickering light transmits, collapse into a red-green-blue tartan jumble of an insect-man poised on pearlescent cones straddled painfully on a floor wearing a jumper - an asymmetrically patterned orange & cream & black & square jumper - against a lime-green rubbery stage like skinned waders. And then there was Light & the Word & names of artists & lives lived: Robert Mapplethorpe (42, 1989), Peter Hujar (53, 1987), Félix González-Torres (38, 1996), David Wojnarowicz (37, 1992), Craig Owens (39, 1990), Jimmy DeSana (40, 1990). The moth likes the DeSana cones, the Brillcream'd mass of Mapplethorpe's head of hair that is hard to imagine a face behind, but it's not too gone on the Dianne B jumper even though it helps plant an orange rectangle centrestage so the rest of Mapplethorpe's body can contort on the floor in the dark, in the light, in innuendo. The image also frightens the moth, noticing the meta in the metamorphosis of both portraits, insect-turned-man-turned insect & one story about a salesman that starts with the sentence: "One morning Gregor Samsa woke in his bed from uneasy dreams and found he had turned into a large verminous insect.”🖤

[In response to Alan Phelan's Fiction & Folly at the Royal Hibernian Academy, 2020]

MARCH 25, 2020 (ORIGINALLY POSTED ON INSTAGRAM @a_flash_in_the_small_night