The thing about a memory is that you never recognise it's happening. A room is just a room, someone is sitting across from you, a hand rests on your shoulder. Nothing particularly remarkable occurs and yet, years later, these are the things that return to us, sometimes with extraordinary clarity, sometimes bearing almost no resemblance to what actually happened.
Next Thursday, OIGÅLL PROJECTS presents They Weren’t Memories at the Time, a new solo exhibition of paintings by Venn Miles exploring the unreliable business of remembering.

Memory, is a terrible liar. We embellish, omit, rearrange and occasionally invent. We remember these people not necessarily as they were, but as we have come to understand them. Over time, those we love/hate become curious constructions of gestures, conversations, physical sensations and things we may have imagined altogether.

Across this new body of work, Miles gives physical form to this instability. Figures stretch, fold and fracture. Faces emerge and retreat. Bodies appear caught somewhere between recognition and disappearance, as though the act of remembering them has already begun to change their shape.

There is something deeply tender in all of this. The idea that a person can remain with us long after they have left the room, but never quite as they were. That even our most treasured memories are works in progress.

Perhaps the strangest thing is that none of these moments knew what they would become. They were simply happening. We were simply there.