Deer, Harry Hugo Little, Oil and Marker on Panel, 40 x 60cm, 2026
Twilight Contemporary is excited to present How to Guarantee a Miracle, a group exhibition featuring the work of Lily Bunney, Mattia Guarnera and Harry Hugo Little which explores the meaning of reverence and the enduring power of the idol in the age of digital culture.
At the heart of each artist’s creative practice in How to Guarantee a Miracle is a heightened sensitivity towards the ephemeral artefacts of the digital world. For these artists, the internet is an inexhaustible well of overlooked, un-mined inspiration. In a creative process that is akin to scavenging, the artist trawls through a non-stop digital stream of human folly and cruelty to find images to study and elevate to the plain of materiality. Secretly captured candid moments, invasive paparazzi shoots, voyeuristic webcam stills, instagram posts and even memes are suddenly treated with a quasi-religious reverence and, in the process of artistic reinterpretation, join to form a new, twenty first century iconographic canon.
In the laboured, painterly translation of each digital image, where the time and effort is recorded in the very fabric of the work through clearly visible marks and strokes, the artist cultivates a specificity, a uniqueness, a presence. As handmade works of art, each piece holds what Walter Benjamin termed ‘aura’. However, this ‘aura’ is deeply troubling as it presents a sharp and perplexing cognitive dissonance. How can an image that is derived from a distinctly ‘aura-less’ source, in that every image taken from the internet is defined by its plurality, it’s very lack of place in space, gain an individual ‘aura’? It is this irreconcilable duality that generates the powerful feeling of uneasiness that pervades the exhibition.
In their newfound materiality, it is clear that these images have not quite been able to shake off the traces of their digital origin. In fact, the tell-tale signifiers of the digital world have been intentionally and carefully preserved. Each artist displays a reverence, not only towards the content that presents itself to us on the web, but also towards the way in which it is presented to us. Throughout the exhibition, the unintended visual quirks of digital communication are rendered faithfully in paint. Images are compressed and broken up into tessellating blocks of colour like low bit-rate video, airbrush is used to mimic the surreal hyper-flatness of the screen and shapes contort, corrode and collapse across the canvas in slick, acidic smears like a buffering stream. Even on the gallery wall, it is as if the artworks themselves don’t have quite enough internet bandwidth to fully render. Thus, all of the pieces in How to Guarantee a Miracle occupy an uncertain, uneasy border between the cold impersonality of the technological and the irreducible warmth of human artistic endeavour.
Fundamentally, How to Guarantee a Miracle is an exhibition that reflects upon the unexpectedly central role of ‘curation’ in the twenty-first century digital age. Confronted with an unimaginably vast sea of content and an unintelligible mass of bewildering information, one feels the need to select, filter and arrange in order to retain some semblance of control and give meaning to the chaos. How to Guarantee a Miracle records this phenomenon in actual, physical space, the work on display is the result of a hopeful attempt to assemble the shattered fragments of modern culture into a reconstituted, jagged whole.
Words by Jamie Hope. Curation by Sam Hanson.
Jenny (Sleeping on camera), Lily Bunney, 130 x 70cm, Oil on Canvas, 2026
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