Orchids, Catherine Street

Saturday 9 December – Tuesday 12 December 2017 Image courtesy of Catherine Street, watercolour on paper, 2017 I am beginning to think of the apartment as a body at rest or recline; or like a voice, the rooms a chorus, or the material for lungs; the long corridor could be its windpipe. It has nighttime speech. Its voice is a filigree of male and female. It has dexterity, but chooses not to extend to impulses, retains its potential energy. The building has teeth too; grey granite teeth, austere frontage and aciculate symmetries (scored by needles). Internally it blossoms, is light and sound, emanates saturated perfumes – made of memory-making. (This is sometimes called ‘Headspace Technology’ by perfumers to recreate space or place memories; and to understand, retrieve or retrace a memory is to recreate the chemistry and electricity of it, by repetition, memory loses a generation each time is it played, just like video tape. Like the video installation ‘Mirror Speech’ by Gail Pickering, and its single channel work offspring ‘Near Real Time’ (2015) which is navigated physically and mentally by its hallucinatory cuts, decays, fades, interruptions, half-awake performances, hypnotised arm and hand gestures and articulations and codes, with wide-awake eyes and head – body and mind separate. Pickering’s “headspace” is a TV studio. Scores and scores of improvisations and personal notations.) Catherine emails me and says the show is called ‘Orchids’. And I know what I know and I know that orchids seduce.