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Public Gallery is pleased to present 00:00:01, the inaugural exhibition at the gallery’s expanded space at 89 – 91 Middlesex Street. 00:00:01 indicates the resetting of a clock or the first moments of a new day, inspired by the Zen Buddhist concept shoshin, translating to ‘beginner’s mind.’ A beginner’s mind humbly positions any form of knowledge as a string of unknowns, embracing a state of mind that is free from habit or expertise, instead ready to doubt, learn and expand through compassion and gratitude. The exhibition brings together 18 artists whose practices consider new beginnings, structures of community, and acts of solidarity – cultivating in the present the world we want to inhabit in the future, no matter how radical or inconceivable it may seem at times.

Beginning with questions rather than answers, Christian Quin Newell’s paintings each function as an exercise in thinking. Often depicted on a journey, his protagonists embody a state of curiosity and meditation, open to learning and imaginative thinking. Yi To’s fossilized compositions speak to a similar cosmological though otherwise pre-narrative state. Her hieroglyphic signatures emerge under sedimentary layers of watered-down oil paint and marble dust, echoing the language of archeology and terrestrial antiquity, or alternatively the sheltered world of a mother’s womb.