Agathe Snow One Enormous Day

Morán Morán is pleased to announce an exhibition of Agathe Snow’s newest work, titled One Enormous Day, which presents nine paintings and a thirteen-minute film that is meant to be viewed after drinking a cup of hallucinogenic mushroom tea. The paintings are bright and blurry reveries of time and space, rendered in acrylic and enamel in continuous strokes executed over a long roll of canvas like a never ending skyscape. Composed of meandering and overlapping lines, repetitive and ceaseless, this body of work was an exercise in isolation, an experience of life as the sunsets seemed to pile up.

Through this series, which the artist calls Endless Sunsets, Snow also considers her own ancestry as well as a broader human history, alongside themes of exploration and colonization. Attached to her Corsican roots and to that island’s difficult past and polarizing protagonists, she is perhaps genetically predisposed to explore, to move, to seek some other paradise, of a place or within the mind. With lines of paint delineating the surface, running north to south and east to west, she is translating all the back and forth – the errands and the pacing – but these restless doodlings also posit figurative visions of horizons intersecting, one melting into the next, coming in and out of focus.

Over these painted plaid sunsets, Snow stitches lengths of Mardi Gras beads, which she began collecting in March 2020 for this series. With them, she sews sinuous constellations that introduce a sort of psychedelia and cosmological sequence over the systematic, yet colorful monotony. Each bead can be seen to symbolize a sun and a cycle, which also reflects and refracts what is painted, creating an artificial light. There is a certain order to it all, one that communicates our shared experience of feeling stuck, and in appreciation of all the horizons and edges of town where we are safe and lonely. With this exhibition Snow reveals a pattern of light and reflection – patterns that connect us.

For a person who cannot stop moving, who can’t ever sit down. Movement and what makes one move is a recurrent theme in my shows, but just like everyone else, I am stuck.
We can now move continents and skies and people and things, and disease, and yet all seems stuck.

It gets stuck in the plaid of it all, a time maze, an artificial light maze.

The discovery of the New World and my discovery of the new world coming as one in this hallucination.

With these few JL Borges sentences I depart…

I wandered several days without finding water or
one enormous day
Multiplied by the sun, my thirst, or my fear of thirst

If one traveled to the west where the world ends he would
reach the waters
which could grant immortality

A time maze of various futures
I do not recall if there was a bell or a buzzer or if I clapped
my hands

The garden of forking paths embraces all possibility of time

– Agathe Snow