Murray Guy is very pleased to present A sensed perturbation, an exhibition featuring recent work by Nina Beier and Marie Lund, Manon de Boer, Matthew Buckingham, Alejandro Cesarco, Moyra Davey, Kenneth Goldsmith, and Josh Shaddock, curated by Jacob King. Please join us for an opening reception on June 18 from 6 to 8 pm.

The works in this show are gestures that strive for attentiveness to affects, situations, atmosphere; finding forms amidst a sense of uncertainty.

In particular, these works evoke the practice of close reading espoused by New Criticism in the 1950s, which called for close attention to the internal dynamics of a text, to the denotation and connotations of language, to structures of paradox. Rather than imposing a theory upon a text, close reading aimed, at best, for a description of the phenomena it attempted to explain.

Simultaneously, though, these artists put pressure on the “closeness” of close reading—the implied proximity to a source—confounding flatness and plenitude, reflecting a disturbed sense of distance and time.

This exhibition takes its departure from, amongst others, Cleanth Brooks’ reading of John Donne; from Moyra Davey’s observation that she mixes “choice and chance somewhat scandalously”; from John Ashbery (cf. For John Clare, 1955); from a report on CNN that mindfulness can reduce stress; from Giorgio Agamben’s reflections on gesture—“What characterizes gesture is that in it nothing is being produced or acted, but rather something is being endured and supported”; from a concept of faciality; from Lauren Berlant’s description of “living in a stretched out ‘now’ that is at once both intimate and estranged.”