Out of Sight, Out of Mind
(2020)
Out of Sight, Out of Mind takes as its starting point places that remain difficult or virtually impossible to reach, whether through geographical isolation, political restriction, spiritual significance or the limits of human access. Known through coordinates, maps and images but rarely encountered directly, these locations occupy an ambiguous space between geographical fact and fiction, sustaining the fantasy of somewhere beyond the problems of the inhabited world.
The exhibition confronts this fantasy with the impossibility of complete escape. Point Nemo, the most remote location in the Pacific Ocean, for instance, contains traces of microplastic pollution despite its extreme isolation. Moving between references to distant sites and the physical conditions of the gallery itself, Out of Sight, Out of Mind considers remoteness as both a spatial condition and an escapist projection — and asks whether anywhere can remain truly outside the systems we might wish to leave behind.
Toad on the Moon takes the ‘boiling frog’ metaphor as a point of departure: the false but persistent belief that a frog will remain in slowly heated water until it boils. The exhibition uses this fiction to consider how gradual deterioration can become normalised, and how adaptation can shift from a means of survival into a form of inertia.
The title draws on myths that locate the figure of a toad on the moon, where it appears in stories of transformation, immortality and escape. Between the warming water and the moon, the exhibition traces a tension between endurance and withdrawal, asking when adaptation becomes acceptance, and when escape might offer another way of responding to an increasingly uninhabitable present.