Twilight Contemporary - Past: Tales Dancing in the Memory

Catalogue

Twilight Contemporary is delighted to present Tales Dancing in the Memory, a group show with work by Elena Angelini, Sofia Bjurström, Antonia Caicedo Holguín, and Emerson Pullman. Together, their practices explore the shifting and often intangible nature of memory through figuration.

Elena Angelini’s muted, seemingly unfinished canvases suspend figures within hazy grounds, where surrounding objects and symbols hang like fragments from unresolved tales. Angelini’s works resist a sense of closure, allowing figures to move in the grey zone between naïve play and quiet consciousness while allowing memory to seep in.

Operating on the boundary between realism and abstraction, Emerson Pullman similarly is restrained in his use of the canvas. Large swathes of the surface are left untouched, giving his bold, decisive marks heightened power. Marks that compile to build a portraiture deliberately left somewhat unanswered where memory becomes an active tool in the narratives of the figures.

Sofia Bjurström’s charcoal drawings somehow seem poised on the edge of vanishing. Her blurred dancers dissolve into light and shadow, their outlines softened until they seem more like recollections than figures. They are timeless, and manage to express life's impermanence, capturing the beauty and wonder of existence in fragile moments that live beyond the relentless march of time.

By contrast, Antonia Caicedo Holguín’s works are vivid and colourful, with dancers lively, and electric in their proximity. Yet even in the carnival colours Holguín’s works resist easy narrative or catharsis. Instead the works suspend time, giving heightened importance to living and just being. They speak to the psychological architecture of memory, intimacy, and diasporic belonging, examining how bodies inhabit and are shaped by familial, cultural, and emotional spaces.

Together, Angelini, Pullman, Bjurström, and Holguín evoke memory and time as something that is never quite resolved - ephemeral and intangible. Tales Dancing in the Memory, brings together a group of artists whose vivid, yet subtle works explore the tales dancing just beyond our grasp.

Curation and words by Sam Hanson

Press Release