Anna Metzger: Fate Junior

Fate Junior is an exhibition of new works by Anna Metzger.

The images in this exhibition invite you to read them as a symbolic alphabet, or perhaps a sentence, holding an urgent, garbled secret. This alley of signs is replete and information-rich, lacy and writhing, awaiting. Metzger draws on: things that freak you out slowly; tearfully recounted descriptions of online flash games; dark glass; de Chardin’s concept of the noosphere. A state of dreamlike, feverish anticipation. A sapphire orb glows in a darkness drawn close, a sinkhole portal to sky or sea.

Many of the materials used are yielding, being translucent or soft and pliable, including plasticine, textile, nails, glass and perspex.

The artist’s dad said recently that when he was a child and he knew everyone who lived in his neighbourhood, the houses on the street looked straight at him; in adulthood he no longer knew the occupants, and the same houses seemed to face up into the sky. Here’s a different question: it is easy and natural to personify a building, but what comes crawling out when, with the best of intentions, you personify a digital house? What would you do if this was non-fiction?

The show will be accompanied by a newly commissioned text by Niall Tessier-Lavigne.

Join us for an opening on Friday 10th May, 6pm - 9pm, then open 11am-6pm Tue-Sat.

Anna Metzger

Anna Metzger (b. 1997, Aberdeen) is an artist based in Glasgow working in image, writing and video. She works across digital, sculptural, photographic and painterly modes of image-making, often using 3D and moving-image forms and structures as a framework for cycles or sequences of images.

Metzger is interested in non-verbal written language, coincidences, gloaming and fear. Her work is concerned with source material that has a ‘deviousness or malevolence… sowing seeds that destabilise or defamiliarise known objects.’ In her images, buildings appear as characters, lines tie themselves up in knots and windows are lit from within. Metzger’s work brings together dread, internet numinosity, replete and total images, the American Midwest.

In a world illuminated by idling car headlights and sodium streetlamps, she weaves signs and symbols into a heavy, translucent network. Through these materials and references, her work invites us along to ‘chase a secret about the world’; asking us to remember, to notice and to return from forgetting.

She graduated from the Slade School of Fine Art in 2020.