Martin’s ‘Wednesday Afternoon’ – which premiered to great acclaim at London’s Counter Gallery in March 2005 – is a twelve minute film in which an anonymous narrator gives an account of his days spent wandering through London’s museums. ‘Wednesday Afternoon’ posits a subjective enquiry into how we spend time and how we value that experience. As the narrator elucidates, “What I want to do is capture the magic of looking at people and things. I want to do this without disrupting what is there or altering anything that might happen … suspending conclusions and resolutions, keeping things open, somehow remaining critical.” Juxtaposing the historical figure of the flaneur (“a man of the crowd”) with the theatre and abundance of the museum ‘Wednesday Afternoon’ is a profound and poetic meditation on the acts of looking, thinking, and passing time.

Widely known for her early images of Robert Mapplethorpe and Patti Smith (Linn’s iconic photographs grace the cover of Smith’s 1972 book ‘Seventh Heaven’ and her 1976 album ‘Radio Ethiopia’), Linn remains a mercurial figure in the New York art world. Her photographs, which deftly avoid categorization, have, for more than three decades, described a world that exists just beyond our rational everyday. Linn’s approach and sensibility, which often seems closer to that of a painter or poet, is startlingly idiosyncratic: her images are possessed by an extraordinary economy, wit and intelligence. Focusing on seemingly mundane aspects of the social landscape – e.g. a tattoo on a man’s back, objects in a museum display, an image of an actor on a television screen, etc. – Linn’s photographs privilege and celebrate the incidental, the peripheral, the marginal, the overlooked, and the neglected. For her White Room exhibition Linn will present a discrete group of images produced over the past thirty years.