Curated by Courtenay Finn
Blue, writer and historian Rebecca Solnit muses, is the “color of there seen from here, the color of where you are not. And the color of where you can never go.” Indeed, the hue’s synonymy with absence, melancholy, and transcendence is perhaps epitomized by Derek Jarman’s final film, Blue (1993)—its saturated ultramarine projection echoing the filmmaker’s experience of going blind. Lifting its title and marrow from Solnit’s 2008 essay “The Blue of Distance,” this exhibition presents works by nine artists who engage this particular phenomenon of obscuration. From “Untitled” (Blue Mirror), 1990, Felix Gonzalez-Torres’s psychoanalytic gesture in the form of minimalist takeaway gazing-pool prints, to Untitled (Roman Note), 1970, Cy Twombly’s inscrutable demonstration in cyan wax crayon and oil of what remains inaccessible to language, the exhibition and accompanying catalogue, with a contribution from poet Anne Carson, seek to articulate what occupies the space between subjects and their objects of desire—that which we’ve deemed blue.