Emerging out of reoccurring gestures of the mouth from previous works, specifically Desert Body Creep (2016), Body Loss (2017), Uncanny Valley Girl (2018) and Sky Blue Mythic (2021), Pattern Recognition is a new work structured by the possibilities of recursion and deviation.
Across these works the mouth has represented an uncanny passageway between the inside and outside of the body. Through the mouth, the body is rendered as both flesh and void, and as a threshold breached—an alien-like tongue escapes, a voice erupts and is sucked back in, liquid is ingested or seeps out, hands reach in only to reemerge as another image of a mouth. The mouth is also a hole, and a hole is necessary to weave, loop, reproduce, channel something through, emerge out of or disappear into. A hole is a topological necessity for turning things inside out.
By looping back and bringing these gestures into proximity, new readings emerge, and not only through temporal disruption, but via a rupture in causation—something that already happened reoccurs, but leads to something that didn’t happen before—a fork is introduced creating a new intersection with new possibilities. Pattern Recognition produces alternative directions for past material, expanding and entangling a pre existing body of work into new and different territories and trajectories, yielding other ways of looking back that alter both the past and the future—past occurrences are rendered as omens that can now point to more than first intended, future trajectories map themselves forward through weaving back through their origins. Pattern Recognition is a work that is contingent on that which has already occurred, in order to produce difference.
By centering gestures that have persisted, showing up again and again, replicating, deviating, and evolving across a range of discrete works over time, Pattern Recognition foregrounds how that which is embodied is never final, and that material that exists in and through a moment of appearance, or reappearance, is, by nature, never closable, and therefore always open—to reconfiguration and evolution, or evaporation and loss—and that transformation of both meaning and matter remain in the present, whenever that present occurs.
Created and performed by Angela Goh
Performances:
November 23-25 2023 – Astrup Fearnley Museet, as part of ‘Before Tomorrow’, Oslo, Norway
June 24 2023 – FABRIKKEN for Kunst og Design, as part of thecarrierbag festival, Copenhagen, Denmark
June 18 2023 – Shedhalle, as part of ProtoZone 11: It’s Weird, Zurich, Switzerland
May 18-27 2023 – Fine Arts, Sydney, Sydney, Australia
Photos at Astrup Fearnley Museet by Julie Hrncirova
Photos at Fine Arts, Sydney by Zan Wimberley