sorry for being not chill is Zoë Field’s first exhibition with City Galerie Wien. Around the full parcours of the gallery rooms, a series of paintings are hung on the walls, sharing variations of the title silly me still clings to the promise held in my memory of his glistening shell. In blue, pink, and yellow ink, the repeated leitmotif is a puppy lying on its back, mid-cuddle in playful surrender or frozen in imploring fear; crucified. Head slanted, eyes up, frontally addressing the viewer with overflowing affect; the power dynamic is oscillating between viewer, cuddler, dog. Is it hurting and can it hurt me? Does it love me when it kisses me first, or is it merely well trained, fickle and deceptive.

A decisive moment in a dog’s training comes when it is going through the so-called puppy fear phase, a short window of time during which it is very impressionable and where the owner should interfere to create discipline, going to the limits of domination to sharpen the dog’s sense of its position and to recognize its master. It makes for a point of insertion, where the owner is in full control as to how far to take this dialectic. Going too hard and it switches to trauma; leaving it to its own, the formation stagnates. This might be a human fantasy. Reversely, the vertical puppy apparition stands in for a longing to possess youth. Silk screening as a technique is a fitting device to iconoclastically deconstruct your obsession; and to knowingly adhere to the icon with devotion and desire.

do i make u sick? i make u sick? i may be sick? i made u sick!

Below the dogs, five taxidermy ducklings waddle along. These, too, are frozen in time, in their mirror image, playing the parts of the young subjects in this unraveled plot told in erotically alienated tones.

The midsection of the space feels horizontal and in transition. A suite of palimpsest prints read as a storyboard as if to organize the memories with chaos as a torch. The movement between the heads kissing in the relief sculpture on the wall is sideways, their gaping mouths receive and feed. The word poison comes from the Latin potare, to drink, which invokes this feeling that sometimes the poisons in our lives are things that we ourselves decide to ingest in the hope that we are stronger than, in the hope that we can work through something as a point of decision. While these are often the poisons that are insights, we partake in the act of drinking and succumb to all kinds of toxicities. Internalized, the poison takes on a life of its own, turns into attitudes and behaviors, and as a neurotic element inside our psychic bloodstreams, it will prey upon us and reappear in disguise.

Yo, i’m sry for being not chill

and I hope you can forgive the impatience of this itchy organ - with its many willful chambers

It’s just…you have so.much.time

Spend it on me

-Line Ebert / Zoë Field