Silver for Girls - Sally Barrett

Silver for Girls

Silver for Girls delights in the tricksiness of perception. Sideways glances and distorted reflections eke out the edges of a reality which is swept away, just as it begins to solidify. Agents of the state roam its perimeter, the unseen edges, along faultlines of desire and infrastructure, holding in check all the menacing and mischievous facets of gendered embodiment.

Barrett’s speakers repeatedly embark on unending journeys by train, motorway, movie screen, memory, dream—all locations infected by perilous pervasions of artifice—where compulsive behaviours give rise to prophetic memory, impermanent emotional specificity and barefaced lies.

Barrett is master of the existential and emotional swerve, depositing speakers and readers in unexpected territory, strange linguistic landscapes often crushing in their perspicacity. Twisting between everything and nothing, paranoia and danger, the overwhelming uncanniness of the quotidian refracts through its performances of dressing, conversing and, occasionally, dancing.

Silver for Girls conjures mirages which delicately, and vitally, evoke the precarity of existing. Amid the rushing noise of the world’s expectations and demands, Barrett’s sharp humour is awake and alive to the “PERIL” of every moment, the undercurrents of dream in reality. A lucid confusion of time, representation and self-knowledge, this is poetry to be taken as tonic, as ultimatum and as reckoning.
NO MATTER