If You Miss Me, Let Me Know with Talia Smith
Meanwhile Gallery, 2018.
If you miss me, let me know considers loneliness and discomfort, and their relation to larger social and economic structures. The artists use objects and places of personal significance to verbalise uncomfortable, unspeakable feelings of loss and longing.
Though the works in this exhibition draw heavily upon the artists’ personal experiences, they remain sensitive to the structural, political, and economic dimensions of loneliness. Much like Olivia Laing states in The Lonely City: Adventures in the Art of Being Alone, contemporary experience is often haunted by an “omnipresent, unanswerable feeling that [one is] in a state of lack, that [one doesn’t] have what people [are] supposed to.” The drive behind our desires are often tied to the system that we live in, more so than something innate in us. Intimacy, satisfaction, happiness, and even contentment are difficult, and near impossible, to achieve – and this failure, more often than not, is interpreted as some individual shortcoming. The artists in If you miss me, let me know rework this failure using humour and confession.
Though the works in this exhibition draw heavily upon the artists’ personal experiences, they remain sensitive to the structural, political, and economic dimensions of loneliness. Much like Olivia Laing states in The Lonely City: Adventures in the Art of Being Alone, contemporary experience is often haunted by an “omnipresent, unanswerable feeling that [one is] in a state of lack, that [one doesn’t] have what people [are] supposed to.” The drive behind our desires are often tied to the system that we live in, more so than something innate in us. Intimacy, satisfaction, happiness, and even contentment are difficult, and near impossible, to achieve – and this failure, more often than not, is interpreted as some individual shortcoming. The artists in If you miss me, let me know rework this failure using humour and confession.
