Maggy Hamel-Metsos concerns herself in this exhibition with the inner workings of witness, those that operate the insatiable desire to see our most vital feelings expelled outside of ourselves. The investigation takes shape as a riddle, composed of found fragments and collected into a melodramatic spectacle of tragic inflection. The organ, salvaged by the artist, is sustained by a series of industrial air compressors that breathe into it their long sighing breaths. Facing it, opera singers scream, children cry. Their images, void of color, are held captive in photographs whose placement in the space is calibrated exactly so that at the moment of the sun's climax its rays steal through the window, reflect in a mirror, and by way of magnifying glass concentrate on each photograph, which then catches fire and vanishes, a heap of ashes its only trace. Each day they will be replaced with new photographs, which will ignite in turn, save on those darker days when clouds cloaking the sun's reach briefly spare them their impending combustion.

The musical term simile aria designates a sung melody establishing a comparison between the singer's circumstance and some larger, usually natural, phenomenon, one that both overwhelms and exceeds her, represented by the music itself. The intimate is then absorbed into the cosmic order of the world, which in turn is absorbed into music’s abstraction. And so drama blurs into total eurythmy, exhausting breath, stifling the image, reconstituting pain as a symphony. As in opera, our lives too can be summed up as a set of sounds measured out by the cadence of our breath. “We're born screaming, and that's how the sun gets in our guts.”¹

Translated by Hannah Strauss

¹ Quote from the artist.