Night Thoughts

Village presents: 'Night Thoughts' solo exhibition and publication by Marina Inoue. Opening reception on Friday 30 January, 6-9pm, Leeds.

“One of my earliest memories of watching television is seeing a woman’s dead body: blue, wrapped in plastic, and washed up on the shore of a lake. I was very young. I don’t remember my parents being there or supervising, and this vague image haunted me for years. In my imagination it grew increasingly grotesque, until I realised as a teenager that I had seen the opening scene of Twin Peaks. It must have been 1990, the year it aired, when I was five years old.

Psychosexual thrillers of the 1980s and 90s understood the bedroom not as a place of rest, but as a charged psychological arena. Films such as Lost Highway (referenced in We Gotta Go to the Desert, Baby), Fire Walk With Me (referenced in Hostile and Impassioned), numerous James Spader vehicles, and late-night cable films like The Red Shoe Diaries (referenced in I Knew You Before I Ever Saw You and Shadowlands) transformed intimacy into menace. Desire and dread occupied the same seductive frames: cigarettes, red lipstick, moody blue lighting, lacy high-cut lingerie. Night was never neutral. It was when repression loosened, alter-egos emerged, and bad behaviour flourished.

This same logic governs the space between consciousness and sleep. The outside world recedes physically, but lingers as a spectre, a watcher. Intrusive thoughts arrive with the confidence of an antagonist who knows the door is locked from the inside. Like obsessive lovers or unstable doubles, they feel both intimate and alien, generated by the self, yet hostile to it. They rehearse anxiety, catastrophe, and fantasy with the relentless pacing of a sleazy thriller tightening toward violence, culminating in a slumber full of fucking nightmares.”

Marina Inoue was born and raised in New York City. A tattooer since 2007, she began working in oil painting after moving to the UK. She currently lives and works in London.