Lonesome Wife

The exhibition “Lonesome Wife” takes its title from ‘Willie Masters’ Lonesome Wife’, a 1989 book by the experimental American novelist William H. Gass.

The book is narrated through the voice of Babs Masters, the lonesome wife of the title. Disappointed by her inattentive husband, she engages in a breezy display of the varieties and visual qualities of language – diverse typefaces, speech bubbles, typographical experiments, in order to seduce a clandestine new lover, who is slowly revealed through the book as the Reader themself.

Using text as a starting point, Gass creates a parallel between a concrete use of language and the female body of Babs Masters, both employed as tools of persuasion, absorbing the reader-viewer in a game of intimate eclipse and revelation.

The exhibition looks at the multiple ways in which seduction can serve as narrative tool as well as an antidote to boredom and disinterest. The exhibited works hint at the body, the physicality of text and the linguistic capacity of objects; moving between the registers of form, process and content, to be read or to be felt.