Wim Wender’s 1993 film, Faraway, So Close, imagines an angel arriving on earth to become human. It’s a loosely associative film; the Cold War is faraway now and current issues, loves and desires are so close.

One way artists understand scale formally is how it relates to the body. It’s particularly true in Karin Davie’s paintings; both her body and the viewers. How far can your arm travel across a canvas? What can a pencil do across a postcard-sized piece of paper?

Scale has changed so much for us in the age of computers. Pinching an image in or out on a screen is such a commonplace that I’ve almost caught myself doing this to a scene in front of me. This show is not only about scale in terms of proportion, but emotional proximity.

Alex Ross sees patterns across infinite distances, while Karin Davie and Daniel Loxton employ tactics that stage scale at the edge of visual apperception. In other words, a painted thing can define its own scale.

Judith Eisler pushes in to capture the detail of a film still, then tightens her drawing technique to pull the eye in after her. Maureen Dougherty’s parallel career in film means that she instictively zooms out and punches in on her subjects. Sometimes very tight. Emma Jaeger employs classic film-like compositions when painting her subjects. 

A detail from a video game becomes reanimated by Millree Hughes to make a different place, a landscape otherwise lost to him. Similarly the emotional possibilities of the title play out in Elizabeth Magill’s work; the ‘faraway’ of Ballymena before the troubles, and the ‘so close’ of more recent events.

In the movie, Cassiel’s nemesis is Emit Flesti—”Time Itself,” in reverse. Connections through space relate across time.