Isabella Amram, Juliet Dodson
Backstage machinations
Night Café is pleased to announce Backstage machinations, a duo exhibition by Isabella Amram and Juliet Dodson. Bringing together painting and sculpture, the exhibition looks at the trickster as someone who understands how perception works and knows how to work within it.
The act of tricking someone. You set up the conditions in a certain way, perhaps through revealing and concealing certain bits of information, so that someone arrives at an outcome you have already anticipated. To successfully trick someone, you need to understand what someone expects to see, how they are likely to interpret it, and how those expectations can be used to produce a different outcome.
The trickster does not necessarily control the conditions they are working within. They understand them well enough to find another way through. Cunning, in this sense, is not simply deception, but a way of reading a situation and knowing where there is room to act. This kind of agency has particular resonance for those whose access to direct forms of power has historically been restricted. Backstage machinations turns its gaze to the mechanisms of trickery: what happens when you cannot change the conditions, but can understand how they work well enough to use them to your advantage.
