PRESS RELEASE
The phrase 'dead-wall reverie' was first coined by Herman Melville in his short story of 1853, Bartleby the Scrivener: A Story of Wall Street. It describes the central character, Bartleby's persistent state of rapt immobility and inattention to the outside world.

Melville's story is of a man who withdraws so far into a state of interiority that in the end only his physical presence remains. The more intangible his personality becomes, the more people are drawn to him and feel the need to understand him; yet his response to appeals to express himself is always a polite, "I would prefer not to".

The exhibition brings together works in a variety of media, that, in different ways articulate ideas evoked by Bartleby and by the phrase 'dead-wall reverie'. As an exhibition Dead-wall Reverie bears upon the problematic relationship between the artist's interior world, their work and their work's audience, with whom it is assumed a dialogue is sought.

"[there was] ...a rather austere reserve about him, which had positively awed me into tame compliance with his eccentricities, when I feared to ask him to do the slightest thing for me, even though I might know from his long-continued motionlessness, that behind his screen he must be in one of those dead-wall reveries of his.' "

From Bartleby the Scrivener: A Story of Wall Street by Herman Melville (1853)

Dead-wall Reverie was curated by Valerie Sutton