In death, in tragedy, in grief, in heartbreak, one’s recollections of the Before Times are often rose-tinted. Hindsight is not always 20-20; the moments before a fall are remembered with a false clarity, a nostalgia for the era prior to the Bad Thing that brought us to our current moment of despair. After the initial shock of the passing of a parent, the planes hitting, the papers being served, memory softens the years before whatever allegorical or literal bomb dropped. We subsequently highlight and reconfigure the way things were into an architecture that befits the narrative we wish to convey, like a eulogy strung together from slightly—sometimes severely—misremembered song lyrics.

Mondegreens and new understandings is an exhibition of Starbucks lovers wrapped up like a douche while Tony Danza holds us closer in the bond that will bring us together.

Reza Aramesh, Nicola Samorì, and Hugo Wilson’s respective practices build monuments to the act of tailoring recollections and reminiscences to suit one’s sense of self, in addition to personal and empiric legacies still being written and reconsidered.

With Bactrian II, Wilson reappropriates a baseline symbol of Britain’s Orientalist duplicity with a rendering of a shaggy camel moulting its wool in a manner that recalls 18th century jewels of the crown like George Stubbs and John Wootten. The Bactrian breed is famously domesticated, but Wilson’s muse is flamboyant, unbridled, and sure-footed as he proudly trots through a greenish negative space that smirks of English school pretense. The camel is isolated, imperfections magnified—no gods, no masters. He’s almost winking at us, asking (and borrowing a mondegreen from Nigel Tufnel), “what’s wrong with being sexy?”

Aramesh’s Action 211, site of the fall: study of the renaissance garden, at 12 noon, Monday 15 July 1968 presents a striking male figure carved in marble, either bound and stripped to be tortured, or slowly disrobing in anticipation of carnal fireworks. The work’s title is evasive in its specificity, the artist gives us an event, place, time, and date, inviting the viewer to speculate on the nature of the scene. Is this David in Calvin Klein preparing for la petite mort or the grand one? The artist’s staging of the human body challenges the viewer with questions of vulnerability and agency, but he alone knows the words to his song.

Samorì’s untitled oil-on-wood-with-copper-leaf piece features a man raising his arms above his head and craning his neck toward the heavens. The brushwork, palette, and subject are reminiscent of Caravaggio or Mario Minniti, but the medium itself is poetically deformed by Samorìs hand—he has peeled the figures arms off, exposing reflective copper leaf on its underside, the hanging “flesh” obscuring the subject’s face and torso. His positioning evokes both the ecstasy of a spiritual awakening and the agony of his dismemberment. If the medium is massaged back to wholeness, will the bodies contained within truly be restored?

In dialogue with one another, Aramesh, Samorì, and Wilson forge new pathways in the way we understand and interpret art history inside our present bubble. There are no fixed positions within the wonky salon of Mondegreens and new understandings, but rather three unique practices which actively engage and manipulate the ever-evolving subjectivity of observing, reinterpreting, and misremembering the world through art and art in the world.

(Text by Ben Lee Ritchie Handler)