A woman is alone in a motel room suspended at the vanishing point between departure and arrival. During those small hours the walls of the motel room become mute screens upon which her desire is projected. She is standing on the threshold of her previous way of living and a new way that has yet been found. She is a stalled traveler drinking alone, daring oblivion.
Exhibition view - The Leyton Gallery of Fine Art
"The narrative has its own real time, but it also fractured into diptychs and triptychs and compressed into partially overlaid and underlying sheets of enhancing and competing visuals. Pelley’s media allows for lots of careful, delicate play of panels, veils and layers. For all that these are “stills,” ie. movie stills, they are not still. Time is passing. The world is moving.
And the woman’s thoughts, the hub of her energy, are in motion, too.
Something has brought her to this lonely place, and something will propel her through and away from it.
A lone figure in a motel is a classic film noir scenario. That person not home, where they would be safe, but out and exposed and travelling according to some external circumstance.
The space they are in is all about their journey. In her statement Pelley calls it a “psychological way-station.”
The next step is something to be interpreted and determined."
The establishing shot, a black-and-white portrait, casts the character in blurred focus against a sky like a 1940s movie heroine. We wonder about her, and her fate."
- Joan Sullivan, The Telegram