The exhibition marks a return from Gerlitz’s recent work in literature and contemporary opera to her roots as a fine artist: as photographer, painter and sculptor. The works consist of object-images printed on sheets of organza, which are then hung by magnets in large, open metal frames. The mechanism of hanging through magnet means that each work is modular and in motion. This exhibition will take place in a gallery (tbc), and will also feature a life art performance based on Roswitha’s final work of fiction—charting the biographical transition between mediums.

 

Gerlitz explains how “the exhibition’s theme, if it has one, is that journey. My last literary work haunts the artworks as something they are attempting to escape: literally, in the space, with the piece read out in disembodied, doubled voices. It’s not so much a beginning or an endpoint as a predator, a ghost. I now try to forget what it means to write. What it means to think—to be. I empty myself, make space for the object. To reach out to something outside the self. You have to wait—but it happens.

 

And when it does, it’s magical. There’s a sense of mutual recognition between you and a safety pin. Or of a button talking back, precocious, sarcastic. Objects may be transcendental but they’re by no means polite. When your keys go missing, who do you think hides them? They’re difficult. As are the artworks themselves. Heavy with metal, yet open like air. Images upon organza, attached only by magnet to the frame that refuses to hold or encircle them. Glimpses of—not things—but an interaction that defied all possibility. And yet still occured.”