Anna Sebastian | The Same Dust at IMT Gallery

IMT Gallery is pleased to present The Same Dust, a solo exhibition by Anna Sebastian, bringing together a new series of paintings exploring imagined and emotional realities. The works take their starting point from the closing passages of The River Merchant’s Wife: A Letter, Ezra Pound’s version of a poem by Li Bai. 

yi¯yi¯ she¯ng lü` tái. 

[one] [one] [grow] [green] [moss] 

one by one they grow green moss. 

Saturated foliage suggests a nostalgia for a setting that you cannot place. You possibly feel a sense of pleasure laced with pain, a sweet hollow longing for landmarks that start to shift, slip and then morph. This is also how Jeff VanderMeer’s ‘Area X’ seduces the protagonists in his Southern Reach Trilogy; an area that crystallises the existing world by eating into its space-time. One reality is burrowing itself into another. IMT Gallery grows porous as another presence presses outward into the space. Sebastian’s paintings are displacing what was once there but also adjoin our lived reality and what is known. Touching our reality without destroying it, The Same Dust series has the potential - at some point - to absorb our perception and transfigure us in the process. 

Moss is deepening beside the gate, as we remain transfixed by the vista. Leaves fall. Butterflies are on the move across the water, their shadows flittering on the surface. Time is entering the landscape as we unfurl into the morning dew; a scent embroiled with notes of bark and damp soil. We pause and observe until the terrain itself appears to be waiting for us. Enveloped by the green sponge, our spines prickle with electricity but we luxuriate in the abandon. 

Excerpts from the exhibition text by Kirsten Cooke.