Catinca Malaimare
Two Screens Left Turned On At Night, 2020

On nights with enough lighting, we are illuminated by light reflected off the Cloud. Where the source of illumination is the dominant spectral line of gold-tinted light scattered at the highest luminance in our faces, we watch with an eye insensitive to other visual pollutants. The nighttime is tinged with yellow biased daylight, and we’re concealed and observant, corner-hidden in the darkest side of the glow dome.

Under the same clouds, temple keepers clean away a day’s worth of finger imprints from the hands that come to touch the irises of the deity statue, whose face we know more through the ends of our fingers than through our eyes. It keeps the eyes spotless for a camera that lies vigilant behind them, awaiting tomorrow’s greedy hands.

Imaginative faculties don’t extend further than a manufacturer’s dream, and a tacit agreement takes even our digitally feathered chickens to the slaughterhouse. We busy our left hands with tethering phones to an Internet that runs a dull connection, while our right hands impersonate a god’s right hand-of-honor to tether chain our devices, cooped up caged in a mesh. And for a second, we shiver when we catch ourselves reflected on a blank screen.

Two Screens Left Turned On At Night hang, dayburning, with wandering eyes all around you, following your moves like a panoptic window. Floating, wishing they left the manufacturing belts as mirrors in our bedrooms instead of TVs on our walls. Existing without knowing what they might look like, giving synthetic reflections, and for the first time, their reflections look familiar.