Gitte Maria Möller, Age 6, Recurring Dream
Your mother wakes you up in your childhood bedroom.
Despite the resemblance, you intuit this person to be a doppelganger/witch.
It is very bright in the room.
Icons and motifs recur across a body of work, continually respawning in basements, dungeons and dead-ends, their initial unease (as simple vessels for complicated feelings) slowly becoming mythic comfort through repetition.
The stranger compels you to follow, and you understand it to be a trick.
Despite the deception, you follow the figure because you feel obliged.
You traverse a house that resembles yours, Cape Dutch, Durbanville.
Drawing on seasonal change, passages of time, purgatory and the end of time, Gitte’s paintings of spaces remain enclosed and bounded by walls, always alluding to an abstract and painterly outside visible over the wall or through the doorway.
You walk out of the front door.
It is midday and bright outside.
A red sports car sits in the driveway, filled with scared children of a similar age to you.
Images are painted over as compositions shift and settle in the early formations of a painting. Ghost images wispily crawl through the layers of paint they’re buried under. Only some of these early (now subterranean) traces are visible on the surface (and even so, only in the right light).
You turn back to find your house has now become a gray fortress.
Despite the shift, the hydrangeas are blooming as usual.
You wake up again, and climb into your mother’s bed.
Text/dream adaptation by Mitchell Gilbert Messina
With special thanks to the Cape Town Unitarian Church for hosting the show
