[an error occurred while processing this directive]
Artwork: Albion Noir by Gill Robinson
Apocalypse 1: 'On the Beach' Brighton
2020
Gina Wisker
We keep our distance.
Furtively eyeing dogwalker and runner
speeding bicyclist and the homeless guy
sleeping in the seaside Victorian folly
In Nevil Shute, the first film
the submariner chooses freedom
fishing in the toxic wasteland waters
of San Francisco bay.
Free from coffined confinement.
His risk level his own.
The second moves the scene to Melbourne.
Late summer strange in the glorious deadly sunset.
As it is here today.
Beyond the faux Far East Pavilion
the glitzy waltzer is disconnected.
The seagulls forage, rise and cry.
All that remains is pebbles.
Weak sunshine and the blank
black skeletal face
of the ghost pier.
**************************************************************************
Artwork: Act 1 by Gill Robinson
So This Is How It Is Presented
Gina Wisker
It seems that
even the new is broken backed,
the old black antique chair as empty
as the new white one from the garden centre.
There are too many doors in too many
endless broken walls.
The paint
though sometime newly done is peeling off and rotten,
the floor dissolving, turbulent.
Each new start
on sorting and compartmentalising
fractures, leaks and peels away, revealing
another mess.
Over and over displaying beneath
the layered failed attempts at construction
at camouflaging
at locking away
the wendigo, the ghoul
the pontianak self.
Meanwhile the legless, filmic beauty, the icon
poses beside the antique props
her Hollywood shroud
reminds of Marilyn
murdered,
drugged,
dissolved.
What of the performance and the archaic pillars?
What of the artifice and the stucco layers?
I’m not yet in here
I’m asking the pillar to turn and reveal
alternatives, its newness, I’m
waiting for the dark self and the bright self to come out
from the cellar and the movie
from behind the corrugated iron and the cardboard
and each take their appointed seat.
Our role in this
is to invite them all in
collate, curate the broken and the hidden with the postured and the
painted with the
locked away.
Strip back the cracked fabric.
We don’t need to tidy it all up.
Its chaos, its disruption is the point.
Once someone’s come in,
and sat down,
maybe we can start.
Artwork: Act 2 by Gill Robinson
Wild Strokes
Gina Wisker
Historical, ravaged, damaged, fluid.
A single dive from a dislocated,
dismembered, fractured,
turbulent present
into at least something else.
The ghosts in chains
appear.
Past moments
Reoccur.
However we surface and survive
dragon shapes emerge from mists
the reconstruction’s transient
delicate
disturbing.
Partial.
In one space a grinning ghoul.
In another a dismembered, bald, chained ghost.
A huge foot, Plath’s colossus
of personal, painful memory.
Solidity cracks and fissures
Is there forward movement in this
locked in, framed, recurrent turmoil?
Are emerging patterns only tropes and traps?
See how the wild strokes
Bleed from the frame.
