#18: 07/23/2024

On the Work of Gosia Machon
by Benjamin Terrell

Dove
2014/2022, edition of 10 (signed and numbered),
​40cm x 50cm (15 3/4" x 19 1/2")

The train whistle blew and a herd of horses was driven in two different directions.

Most art is born from the struggle of freeing itself from that of which it is not. And during that exchange, the artist is temporarily free to wander beyond the confinement of her or his mortality. Sometimes we too begin divided, as both illusion and apparition, haunting mansions of our own making. Artist Gosia Machon, corresponding about this show, explained that in German "geist" meant ghost but also can mean mind. And for her the mind isn't individual and anchored, it is part of a collective air-body that includes our entire atmosphere and is inseparable from what circulates and sustains us our entire life. Perhaps Machon's ghost is also "us" prior to our preferences, and Silent Ghost is the quiet mind that precedes a false notion of separateness and superiority. Let us then not struggle to become, but to emerge from the fiction of fantasy and let us be preened by our ghosts like a fowl might fix its feathers.

Visor
2022, ink and charcoal on paper, 40cm x 30cm (15 3/4" x 12") 

"A man in passing glanced in a window, and all he'd ever seen was there. In the next street, a boy walked along, counting the cobblestones: One, one, one, one, one."
- Cole Swensen

Life is often as ungraspable as pipe smoke, as illusory as the surface of a pond mistaken for what it reflects. At best we perpetually "polish the mirror" and work with a handful of things that are fully understandable, arranging them in new and harmonious ways like the reappearing vessels of a Giorgio Morandi still life. For poet Cole Swensen, Goest (the title of the book of the above passage) means "to emerge" and to brighten from source. This could also be a reimagining or inversion of ghost. "The shapes would live themselves to life," writes Swensen, as if also to say, energy without shape can will itself into light. In another book, this one of essays, Swennen suggests that creative fiction exists fluidly between the real world and the boundaries of its fabrication. She quotes the Paul Hoover poem, Childhood and Its Double: "Everything's more real, once it finds its mirror. The grey lake and its grey sky."

Unborn
2018, edition of 10 (signed and numbered),
​45cm x 55cm (17 3/4" x 21 1/2")

By far we are the most beautiful, victorious when we reach the shallow valleys. We love it in the gray clouds, so much so that the condensation makes the wings almost too heavy.

​We are by far the most beautiful. Now, having arrived in the damp valleys, the sky hangs lower. We love flying in gray clouds, our wings almost too heavy from the condensation.
​
- (original text by) Anke Feuchtenberger

Above are two interpretations from Google Translate of a text about Gosia Machon's work. We too evolve and devolve in virtual spaces and poetry is often the persistent ineffable ether of the places we feel the most certain, words gasping for further breadth. Translation at its most sincere is ghostly refraction, a stratus blanketing between art and its intention, like a grayed prismed playground for spirited potential. We could also add- truth is debatable as its translation, truth is deflate-able at the source of its friction, truth is as unstable as its diction. Perhaps the most successful two-dimensional art, like Machon's, acts as a reflective surface between us and all of the subtle yet staggering indivisible beauty that lovingly shimmers around us. Ghostly are the two types of silence: restrictive silence born from limitation when the unguided mind dampens potentiality, or the kind that comes after direct experience but before articulation. It is the second variety that induces awe.

Gods and Goats
2024, edition 10 (signed and dated),
40cm x 50cm (15 3/4" x 19 1/2")

The passage is taken; the maze builds. Side riffs curl off. Direction is difficult to keep. Space is behaving strangely - and so too is time. Time moves differently here in the underland. 

It thickens, pools, flows, rushes, slows. Down between the roots to a passage of stone that deepens steeply into the earth. Colour depletes to greys, brown, black. Cold air pushes past. Above is solid rock, utter matter. The surface is scarcely thinkable.

Robert Macfarlane, Underland​

In a sea of deep sepia and clinker brick brown shapes shun shadow to make masks of what were once recognizable faces. Machon's masks are more like the inside of masks than the surfaces of a false face, as if the artwork itself was our veil to see beyond this era of casual viewing to deeper inquiry and participation. A mask in the round is a globe, the spherical weight of entirety or perhaps the full circle of a cycle fulfilled. In silent Ghosts the circle is central- it is the moon that a passing bird divides, it is the head of a human and the oversized blooms of the branches above. Reappearing as dark orbs stacked and tethered to a single white orb, like interdependent and intimate engines of circumference. Machon's atmospheres are often like a tunnel or a conduit, paradise's boiler room perhaps, where creativity's most basic elements are transformed, offering a more insightful passage.​

Left: Mask
2014, ink on paper, 40cm x 30cm (15 3/4" x 12")
Right: Heritage
2022, ink on paper, 40cm x 30cm (15 3/4" x 12")

Many images in Silent Ghosts are birds and what is a bird beyond its song but a meditation on flight and how a dialogue with the wind balances two opposed worlds. The bird's domain is the sky, yet they rule it only temporarily and although a bird nests on the ground, they are not entirely of the earth either. Similarly displaced, we spend the first half of life grounded by a skewed sense of worldly ownership, yet later life is a realization that nothing is ours beyond the way we occupy the unknowable. The bird then is an apt symbol for how the fragility of ascension exists interwoven with the weight of vulnerability. Perhaps an ephemeral truth of the Silent Ghost is that once we are able to identify with one thing completely, we are already in the process of becoming something else. I have read that what we see as reality is actually only a sliver of a full circle of experience that we inhabit, the rest being beyond our senses' ability to measure. ​

We are ghosts, then, illumined by parts of ourselves we have yet to meet, we fade and are silently reborn, separating from that which we think we are not.​

Your Eyes
2022, edition of 10 (signed and numbered), 20cm x 28cm (8" x 11")

The Donkey
2022, ink on paper, 20cm x 28cm (8" x 11")

You can see more of Gosia Machon's work...
     - on her website
​     - on instagram: www.instagram.com/_gosiamachon_/?hl=en
     - on MePaintsMe