🏴Amidst the self-promotion, self-righteousness & performed self-effacement on social media, what is it about a particular image that it can solicit your attention in the ocean of images that doomily scroll past your gaze? The deck of images is stacked against the possibility of such an image pushing through the surface of Instagram, to breathe on its own, separated from the never-ending reproductive organs of technology.

But there it is, an image that, through the ambiguous aerodynamics of line & form, seamlessly sfumatos from lipstick red to oily shadow to SMEG white. Yet this is not a line of refrigerators or toasters, but two cars captured on camera from above. Maybe from an apartment — dated 2021, a year into the pandemic, when we were still looking from an isolated frame, or at least still conditioned by the memories of a physically cropped world.

The title “the coombe (I)” has a roundness to it (with its self-conscious lowercase “c”) that slipstreams into the chop-shop of sight, to then sink back into black rectangles pooling here & there. It’s like that scene from Hitchcock’s Psycho, when Norman Bates pushes & rolls the car into a twilight swamp. Like Norman, we must have something already in the trunk for an image to rise from the depths of its unavoidable submergence. The Coombe (with a capital C), a word, a place, a hospital, is not sexy. Neither are facemasks. But Dorje de Burgh’s image is — that’s saying something in the image bank of now.

📸Dorje de Burgh, the coombe (i) c-type 260 x 340 mm (2021); Still from Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho (1960)