Spit In the Wind Near the Ocean and Which Salt Returns? is an exhibition of new paintings accompanied by a text written by the artist. The paintings are produced via an intense kind of insistence, worked on long after they demand to be abandoned. In this way, the process involves a fervent submission to the particular kind of discipline paintings dole out. Material discipline—the way acrylic won’t bind properly to wax or fast drying paint will crack if applied atop a slower one—but also aesthetic discipline—the way a painting, at some point, will start giving directions instead of taking them, will be obstinate or generous, depositing you somewhere perplexing though possibly beautiful. In this way, each gesture that adds something to, or erases something from, the canvas enacts and indexes a particular kind of life-process: in painting, as in drawing, as in sex, work, love, growth, metabolisation, travel, speech, you have to submit to a logic that will always curtail or order, in nonsensical ways, any volatility you present it with. This indexing isn’t automatically interesting, but if enough gestures are accumulated they reach an arrangement whose terms are loose, they form an object which is both an archive and something in transition, always open to another scuff-mark or droplet. 〰️ Gabriel Curtin is an artist, writer and editor living as an uninvited guest on unceded Arrernte Country. His work broadly considers poetry’s ability to locate and enact relations unencumbered by policy.