When Time Is a Keyhole

Irene Pantelis
Curated by Aneta Georgievska-Shine

Wednesday, September 4th through Saturday, September 28th, 2024

"The works in this show were inspired by my houseplants. A quiet presence in my home, I have a ritual of watering, dusting, pruning, and cleaning them every weekend. One day, looking at a pile of small leaves, roots and whatnots that I had trimmed, I decided to make prints with them. I rolled them with inks, watercolors and acrylic paints on a flexible plate, testing various natural and synthetic papers, responding to the mono prints with more marks, reassembling some with collage. As I worked, I noticed that the trimmings only made clear imprints when fresh. Trimmings that were a few days old made ghostly or white cutouts instead. I found myself grappling with how elusive imprinting can be—hard to form, hard to preserve—like memory and recollections. And yet, the silhouettes of what failed to imprint, like keyholes, revealed the exact shape of what was missing, echoing that what came before us might have built doors, but also left us the keys.”