L.A is Midnight in a World Deserted by Providence;
I can Swim Over and Make it My Own

It could be dark out. Cats could be swelling the back alleys and rooftops. I could be leaning out of the kitchen window, watching the lights blinking endlessly, gathering them up like a good backseat passenger in a summer storm. The night could be thick, difficult to wade through, in need of a serious person with little to no patience for people like us to sift their way through this space. I could be watching it all happen from the rooftop.

L.A is Midnight in a World Deserted by Providence is the poesis of a series of feelings and memories grafted together—with canvas, paint, wood, and chain. It gathers moments, images, and happenings primarily using Google Earth (and JSTOR, occasionally) as its archival source. It ratifies these images, slips them into pockets of wood, holds them close, remakes the panoptic archive of suburban America (suspended in an endless heat wave) into something tangible, an obsessive hyper-moment. It creates new stories out of old images. It messes up Google Earth—and other institutional archives’—illusions of total continuity. It pays attention to fragments. To forgotten moments, to blurry images, to anarchival material. It loiters in the cracks and spaces that the archive cannot cover; blurred out faces, visual information redacted from Google Earth, unintelligible silhouettes, images so fissured from their origins that they take on a new embryosis of meaning. It points to the holes in the archive and creates new poetics out of them. Through this series of inversions emerges a glimmer, a trace, a feeling that evades monolithic definition.

Artist Bio:
Mailey Horner is Toronto-based a writer and artist from London, Ontario. She is anticipating graduation from the University of Toronto, with a major in English and a minor in Visual Studies in November of 2023. Her areas of interest orbit the nexus of literature and poetics; digital and visual culture; as well as memory and the archive. She approaches her research largely through the influences of critical and queer theory and through the principles of historical materialism. In her art practice, she is interested in exploring materiality through medium—namely paint, paper, wood, textiles, and digital mediums that oscillate between archival and anarchival ephemerality. Her writing can be read in Acta Victoriana, The Trinity Review, Goose Fiction, and Idiom Journal. She has recently published her first chapbook, B., and Windows. This is her first solo-exhibition.