AGENT FROM THE OUTLANDS
CATHERINE MOSLEY ———— NEW WORK

“Sometimes reality is too complex for oral communication.”

Enter the gravelly teachings of the fascist Alpha 60 computer, following the musical dragnet of the films opening frames. I am referring, of course, to Jean- Luc Godard’s kooky 1965 fusion of science fiction, pulp, and surrealism — Alphaville — which ’embodies legend in a form’ — and was the hypnopompic inspiration for two of Mosley’s slipstream works on view at A.I.R. Gallery. Begun as figure drawings, studies drawn from a live model at roughly life size, Alphaville I and II became progressively mannequined and colossifyed as analogues of the deadly bathing beauties in Godard’s sci-fi-noir-fantasy. They are positioned as pillars in the exhibition, vacantly optical with oui/ non, dot/dash corneal inscriptions. What wave-length are we on? and what is Mosley doing? I feel very strange, the way living in the twentieth century made me feel, cognitively dissonant and not entirely real.

————Let’s smoke a cigarette first though. Got a light? The arrow points right. It’s Oceanic Time. We approach the suburbs. The regions of Silence. Logic. Security. Prudence. Turn left and pull up to the revolving door. Register at the desk. Figaro-Pravda. Room 344.

Through scattered lights, attend the form. The figures have to adapt themselves. Or is it the technique that adapts? Are we given female form, monster, seductress third-class? Instead of form there is a multilayered weave: scrambling, crisscrossing — a trellis that ties the Alpha-girls — grafted front and behind, side to side, top to bottom with wild roots. X/Y across the shoulders and chest Dot/Dash.

Subcutaneous depths. Fissures between ink platforms. Are they somnambulists? Will they ever wake up?

————Listen doll. I’m a big boy.

What can we deduce about the printed tangle? Oil, stencil, overprinting, upside down printing, paper and wood, rise to the surface, collapsed flatness, mechanical truths, threefold/fourfold/tenfold scales. The tangle springs through head, loins, breast. REM sleep, the Alpha twins are double channels. Adjust the focus. The integrity of the body is at stake; ‘the sadness and durability’ of the face. Study the angles and colors, the subdued range, and then move on to the convolutions of Dot-Dash 10-12 for hyperbolic blue, yellow, black and the erosion of imagery into shreds, into a crazy plaid. Which way is up?

————You want to sleep? Swim? This way. You can rest. The bedroom’s here.

————Get lost in it.