S O L A C E: The Art of Intimate Absence – Theme for an Imaginary Exhibition

Dreamwalk, Mimi Gellman, Edward Day Gallery, Giclee print, 2002. (Image courtesy of the artists)

Note: All images are courtesy of the artists.

“In dreams begin responsibilities . . . ”– Delmore Schwartz

In the museum of dreams, anything is possible. Perhaps prompted by viral circumstances, I imagined an installation of images, objects, films, videos and performances addressing social issues of import which impact everyone in today’s world: anyone who wonders how we maintain our mutual bond as people and cultures during a challenging time of collective isolation. The three well-known artists contemplated, Mimi Gellman, Vessna Perunovich and Nayra Martin Reyes, have a unique but shared interest in exploring isolation and identity politics, gender issues, exile and refuge, persona and displacement, and travel, in what I am designating as a post-proximity world. They express through their artifacts a transnational and humanist domain which is essential for us if we are all to survive the challenges facing our global cultures at this precarious moment in our common history. They each approach a new vista verging on the merger of safe place and secure shelter with vulnerable empathy and alienated exclusion.

Detective Story: C.B. Strike

Holliday Grainger and Tom Burke in C.B. Strike.

I fell for J.K. Rowling’s Cormoran Strike detective novels at the beginning of the series, The Cuckoo’s Calling, which she published in 2013. (She uses a nom de plume for these books, Robert Galbraith, but the beans were spilled after the first one was published.) As fans of the Harry Potter books might have expected, they’re intricately plotted, with wide-ranging, sharply drawn characters, and you wrap yourself up in them; once I start one I have to stave off the impulse to do absolutely nothing else until it’s done but turn the pages. She’s written five; the latest, Troubled Blood, came out last September. Her heroes, Strike and Robin Ellacott, run a successful London detective agency, though she starts, in The Cuckoo’s Calling, as a temp who gets a gig at Strike’s ragtaggle business. In the course of solving the crime, the killing of a famous model that the cops have dismissed as a suicide, both Strike and Robin herself discover her gift for investigation; and by the end of the novel he’s agreed to make her his partner.