Exhibition Essay by Sam Johnson-Schlee

In our house there is always something in the way. When my dad died a few years ago I brought back a lot of his paintings and didn’t hang them properly. I have left them leaning here and there: at the top of the stairs, in the way of a bookshelf. And in some places there are images laid on top of one another. On the mantelpiece we have a framed poster, leaning on it is a painting I made years ago that I found in a folder and put there. Also a postcard, also a plate also a trading card.

I have these shallow shelves on one wall in the room where I work. I have various things arranged on them. Books, postcards, photographs. My daughter, who is 15 months old, has taken a shine to an A4 photograph of a wolf called Peyto. My dad sponsored it in 2002 and I have had it up there since I found it in an envelope in his house after he died. Every time we are in the room she wants to look at it; it used to be pristeen and now it is crumpled. I guess it is the wolf’s eyes, which look right back at you, or perhaps something more primal, but she is obsessed with the wolf.

Since seeing Jonah Gebka’s paintings I’ve started noticing the way that images layer up in my house. And how each picture brings something inside. Like the windows open on a computer screen every image makes a little door into somewhere else. A laptop on a sofa playing a video with yoga instructions, or a telephone, or the children’s books scattered everywhere, the windows from over the road that appear in my windows. Each one a portal – a way out, and a way in.

Walter Benjamin and Asja Lācis talked about porosity in their essay on Naples. There they saw the home as an “inexhaustible reservoir” of life pouring out into the world. They describe baskets lowered through windows and sheaves of photographs on walls. I love this essay for its attention to the relationship between the inside and the outside, and the political possibility of a city where that distinction is thinned to breaking point.

Jonah Gebka’s paintings make the walls feel thin. Each one summons a moment, a glance that you might otherwise have overlooked. In doing so the painter gives the viewer an opportunity to think about what happens when we use bodies, and windows, and screens to make frames. These images push gently but firmly on normative ideas of domesticity. The images that look inwards conjure a kind of cramped and ordinary intimacy, and those that look out of windows make a stage-set out of layered planes. In the former there appears little space for any other action to take place, in the latter a frozen screen and a window make space for dreaming. I find myself split and passing through into each setting; the open window and the isometric city. Each painting a blink of the eye.

Sam Johnson-Schlee is a British writer and academic whose work explores architecture, domestic space, and everyday life. He is the author of “Living Rooms” (Peninsula Press, 2022), a sharp and tender collection of essays about home, intimacy, and the politics of space. His writing combines personal observation with cultural theory, often tracing how spaces shape—and are shaped by—our habits and desires.