Existing holes and blemishes on the gallery walls are filled with colored plaster while new holes are drilled to form popular tattoo designs around the space. By following the usual labours of installing an exhibition, but turning it on its head, the work displays both and draws association between marking the body as a cultural tool and the history embeded in the “surface” of the gallery.
Its title The chance encounter alludes to the quote “As beautiful as the chance encounter on an operating table of an umbrella and a sewing machine” by Comte de Lautréamont (1846-1870), a literary precursor to Surrealism. Through this the work unfolds in a series of metaphorical relationships between desire, exhibition, identity, materials and imagination, where absurdity acts as a poetic conduit between them.
