A Fine Thread of Deviation was the second of a three-commission series between PIA and Mercer Union that are taking place over 2017, 2018 and 2019.

This exhibition picked up from and radically revised Anne Low and Evan Calder Williams’ collaboration A Fine Thread of Deviation, first presented at ISSUE Project Room, New York, in 2016. In an exploration of continuous experimentation, Low and Williams reimagined the dynamics and tendencies of their collaborative work and materialized it wholly new.

A Fine Thread of Deviation was a collaborative textile, video, sonic, and linguistic work that centred on the intersections between a screen and its projection. At its heart was a projection screen woven on a loom by Anne Low and with a pattern co-designed by Low and Williams. The screen and its pattern formed the structure of the video and sound work shot and assembled by Williams, less a film than an animated graphic composition that drew from the histories of weaving, capitalism, technical systems, and landscape.

The collaborative project transformed the main gallery into an installation itself which acted as an interface for temporal marks made by the movement of bodies through space. Meanwhile, the back gallery acted as a literal “backspace”: it housed new sculptures created by Low, foregrounding the provisional dimension of the exhibition.

This project is supported by Partners In Art.