Laith McGregor | Long Days, Longer Nights
15.03 - 19.04
Starkwhite Auckland is delighted to present Laith McGregor’s Long Days, Longer Nights from 15 March – 19 April.
With each new day, I seem to continuously ask myself new questions. Over time the questions have developed a theme. These questions centre on my family and our place in the world. More broadly, the questions revolve around the human experience, and they inevitably reach the same conclusion every time, like cyclical uncertainties. ‘Has humanity always been this crazy?’, ‘Is it just me, or is everyone bananas?’, ’What is real and what is unreal?’, ’How do we belong?’, the list goes on. But more importantly, ‘How does one make sense of the world in which we live?’
Information from seemingly every angle creeps into our periphery, good and bad, cementing itself onto our consciousness. Unnecessary information, instructive information, factual, conceptual, stimulatory information, hold our attention and relentlessly won’t let go. With a flip and a swipe, we’re onto the next tidbit, we constantly seek more, and find more ways to perpetuate the flow of content, to digest and consume, but at what cost? When should we decide to stop absorbing before fatigue sets in? Surely we don’t need this much information?! We must be able to filter between what is important and what isn’t, to slow down and read between the lines. Ironically, the between space, more often than not, is somewhere closer to the truth we seek.
But what is to be believed? Perhaps we need to find that which cannot be grasped, to locate this elusive space between fact and fiction? But first we must ease the flow of information to a digestible pace, to pinpoint what is necessary, and what is fluff. Finding a language of that which cannot be seen, heard or touched, is a difficult endeavour, at times an almost Sisyphean task. Attempting to locate an invisible world, to make visible, to create a reality, is certainly a challenge, but one worth exploring.
We all make our own realities and carve a perception that caters to our own needs. Like a mask, we create illusions to deflect difficult situations, to help navigate an easier path within this hectic world. I am reminded of the commedia dell’arte pantomime. The act of theatrics begins to take shape in my mind, but also within popular culture as well. Certain characters stand-in for particular human tropes, emotions and politics. Overt actions and exaggerated expressions of how we live, help elucidate that which is difficult to put into words. The world has become a theatre and we are simultaneously the actor and the spectator, our surroundings, the stage.
I often feel like a Mime, silently acting out propositions and stories, evading truths, building pitches, making, assembling, creating my own language to help understand this life. The Mime, the imitator, or actor, uses gesture and movement in space to create a world, outward expression, inward impression. Throughout history, the greats from Pierrot, to Chaplin and Marceau have challenged perceptions, upended the norms and located a pure truth of their immediate social environment.
“Mime goes beyond movement, it goes really deep in the human soul, it shows the interiority, the feelings we have, the emotions, even through immobility, and then we can feel the flow of time, like we feel it in music when we feel the sound. Mime is alike to graphic art, because we draw in space, like the painter draws on a canvas.” Marcel Marceau
Mime allows for a moment of reprieve, it offers a quiet space to collect our thoughts and contemplate the space around us. Similarly, painting holds an air of respite. It forces us to slow down, look, observe, think and understand. It is still and demands our concentration. With these ideas in mind, I found myself gravitating towards painting as a predominant medium, to help execute my musings on the Mime, and its position in broader culture. Painting and the Mime were aligning in the studio and finding a coexistence. The slow rhythm of arranging figurative representation, is akin to the actor, silently constructing the scene, building layers to project an inner expression. In the studio, I stand somewhere in-between, a conduit for an elusive truth.
Time slows down, questions remain unanswered. I wait for paint to dry, to perhaps continue, to build another layer, or maybe the negative space is enough, is it finished? I need to find that quiet space that the Mime occupies and let the subconscious guide the work, to conclude the ending. I close my eyes in order to see. The questions keep coming. Days are long, nights seem longer.
Laith McGregor, February, 2025.