Synchronistic Curation #1
I’ve been noticing, for a while, something strange and beautiful keeps happening. Artworks, submitted independently, by different artists, with no coordination or shared brief, often arrive close together in time – already in aesthetic or energetic conversation.
Sometimes two, sometimes three, sometimes more. No prompt or theme and the artists don’t know each other. And yet, the works move in rhythm – tonally, emotionally, structurally. They speak, echo, belong together.
This isn’t curatorial selection in the usual sense. I’m not bringing them together. I’m witnessing something already joined. Just now I visited the New Work section and it was four… A figure mid-spin, suspended in a slow storm, together with a portrait – head, encircled by marks and memory, part portrait, part map. A landscape / dreamscape folding inward, green and planetary, with what looks like an inky planet on the horizon and then the outline of a single flower at dusk, blue-edged, ambiguous, precise.
Each one holding a centre. A circular force running through them an eye, orbit, bloom, spin.. The binding force perhaps that centrifugal pull, the recurring centre. Arriving each on time, separate in origin, and yet clearly, already in relationship. Entanglement? (!) Something that was together, or will be together, already behaving as if it is? Not arrangement, but return.
I’m just noticing. Naming. What do we call this? This is not curation? (It’s recognition.) Could sit well alongside Not a Newsletter…?
A space to hold what returns together.
Synchronistic Curation?
Creative Entanglement?
Quantum Curation?
For now I’ve entitled this section Synchronistic Curation. Let’s see what name finds it…
They were just sitting next to each other on the gallery website like they’d arrived together. That happens a lot.. and I always wonder if it’s synchronicity. Jung would say yes. They’re a lovely couple, aren’t they?
One is called Limitations in the Shadows 3. You can feel the title before you read it. That blur – it’s not softness, it’s structure. A translucent membrane between the subject and the world. She’s lit, poised, present – and yet held behind something. Like the gaze can’t quite land. Or isn’t allowed to. It’s psychoanalytic before you even begin: the visible woman, half-erased. The body framed but not fully met. The barrier is both photographic and societal. She’s there, but she isn’t given.
And beside her: Hour For Magic. Which sounds like a spell you’re only allowed to cast once. Or a time of day no one taught you to claim. And there it is – a pot plant on a pink table, so vividly outlined it’s almost vibrating. Contained joy. Bold edges. A still life that’s quietly pulsing with self-possession. It feels like something hard-won.
Together they feel like two parts of the same analysis: the shadow and the spell. The limitation and the breakthrough. One asking
Can I be seen?
The other answering
I already am.
