Someone Else’s Ghost

From funerary masks to manuscript illustrations, artworks have long been conduits to the dead, or a platform for our haunted pasts to reach visibility. The effect of these apparitions depended on how they manifested among the things of the world. In this way, artworks and ghosts are homologous. Both rely on worldly materials to conjure presences at once recognizable and out of place among sentient life. Their power to haunt lies in their intermediary character, allowing them to seep from one space into another like a forgotten memory that returns through the bedroom window. The artists in this exhibition conjure ghosts that might be shared across psychic or public life. This might mean a societal relation based on what haunts two strangers, such as drawings that bring to the surface immaterial presences shared across categorical boundaries and private domains. A ghost that is not one’s own unlocks the possibility of seeing each other’s past – be it familial, cultural, or ideological. In short, each of the artists addresses the problem of how we relate to someone else’s phantasms, movements, or possessions. By doing so they materialize the margins of historical memory, summon cultural impulses deemed lifeless or unknowable, and conjure new energies that constitute life from another domain.

• Sam Vernon
• Matt Savitsky
• Munro Galloway
• Angie Jannings
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