Lost & Found
Things that never became essays.
Ordinary things that slipped slightly out of place and became uncanny. Freud had a word for it. I just call it the internet making me stare at a picture for far too long.
Sigmund Freud used the uncanny (das Unheimliche, literally “the unhomely”) to describe the strange feeling produced when something familiar becomes subtly unfamiliar — when an ordinary reality develops a crack in it and suddenly feels wrong, eerie, or strangely significant.
A memory somewhere between a space and a mind's eye, Lee Kyutae's paintings seem to describe what the world looks like when it has briefly forgotten its own name. Streets softening.
Skies remembering their color. People into small characters swimming through huge chambers of green and light and blue. A bookshop which becomes a hall. A street which becomes…nothing more than a doorway onto anywhere. A pond that holds on to the sky for itself. A city that takes its time, with absolutely no indication that anyone has anywhere pressing that they need to get to.
This, I think, is what I love about them. They don't demand to be understood. They just…are. Quaint. Non-judgmental. They feel like someplace where I have been, someday hope to be, or imagined on occasion and then conveniently forgotten about.
On the episode of Going Down The Cat Hole (the name was better in my head but what the heck?!) - for artists Carlotta Notaro, Karin Hosono, Louis Wain, and Anne Mortimer, cats, apparently, have range.
Take Notaro for instance. There’s something very tactile about her cats. The texture, the slightly rough marks, the way the fur almost feels embroidered into the image. And they’re not trying to be particularly dignified either. They look curious, sleepy, mildly suspicious. Basically, cats behaving like cats, which is already quite an achievement.
Hosono went with rounder, stranger, more exaggerated. The eyes, the faces, the expressions. Everything feels deliberately pushed a little further than reality, but somehow you recognise the animal immediately. That's what I found interesting. She isn't trying to make the cat look anatomically perfect. She's trying to catch the catness of it. Which sounds ridiculous until you look at them and realize exactly what I mean.
And then, obviously, Louis Wain. Simply iconic! Dressing up, performing, drinking, playing instruments, going to parties. What I love about his work is that he gives them these enormous personalities while somehow keeping that slightly vacant, slightly chaotic cat expression intact.
And Mortimer feels completely different again. Her cats don't need to do anything. They're just there. On a bed. Near a window. Beside a cup. In a garden. Among books. And somehow that's enough. There's this lovely domestic quality to them, like you've walked into someone's house and interrupted a cat halfway through its afternoon plans, which, frankly, were probably just sleeping.
It’s just fascinating how the subject remains the same, only the perception changes.