Coulisse Gallery proudly presents ‘The Waiting Room’, a group show featuring the artists Lisa Liljeström (SE), Marcus Bergman (SE), Ebba Birkflo (SE) and Eva Marie Nelson (USA), curated with Nathalie Viruly. Waiting is a game and a room. It “holds those who have come to go”[1] before moving on to uncertain futures and worlds. Some argue that to be human is to be sentient, but transitory feel more adept here; for it’s unclear whether things are passing through and passing by or how long they might stay and in what state. Within this uncertain passage, ‘The Waiting Room’ takes its roots, drawing on the fragile state of life and creation with its requirements for momentum and pause – the ambivalence of the in-between and the incoming. Lisa Liljeström’s air-brushed, monochromatic paintings exemplify this with a restless, post-internet telling of waiting. She paints boots and paws, car seats and working hands and entitles them “once in a lifetime”, “can’t relate”, “grip”, and “routines”. The materiality and texture of her works are fleeting and particulate, partly due to technique and the fragmentation of her subject matter. Liljeström digitally distorts an archive of found images, imbuing new meanings and emotions attached to them. In doing so, she captures a sense of interiorities on the move or something reminiscent of waking up mid-dream, breathless, and trying to fall back into a self-constructed world. Thus, hyper-focused frames straddle the lines of familiarity and momentarily invite a gaze towards strange details of the everyday. Birkflo and Nelson draw, each with differing permeance related to their medium and subject matter. Birkflo works in blue ballpoint pen in a thrashing and trance-like mark-making flow. She depicts the chthonic and romantic, often in reference to Baroque works such as Ruben’s Fall of the Damned. In ‘Nature’, she presents the exchange between heaven and hell as a forest extension and an expression of ephemeral limits. In some way, this telling of death is an ode to the routines on her father’s pig farm and an agrarian life intimately connected with cycles of death, birth, and necessity. There is purgatory within her lines and an urgency to render saints and slaughter in the wait. Eva Marie Nelson, with two pencil works, also draws on the personal. They explore the afterlife and the unknown futures they represent. Nelson works closely with the body as a garment designer and an artist. As such, there is an acute awareness of revealing and concealing, the importance of negative space and the body. Her work is soft, almost faint, building and erasing simultaneously to create marks of lives lived and lost. There are stories of death, addiction and illness, a transformation of the body over time and a reliance on those not present. Marcus Bergman punctuates the waiting room with bone-like sculptures of unknown species, futuristic and archaeological carnal creatures built over time in layered wax. His forms, both painterly and sculptural, are trapped. They are between the living and dead, perhaps extinct or yet to be born. Exoskeletons and endoskeletons, sinews mottled pink indicate the flesh once connected at the bone. His poetics for fragility and transition is evident as the sculptures stall assumed decomposition and give sensuality to a finite sense of mortality. No bacteria are here to eat away, but the dead are caught in a pause, still somewhere between air and absence. Parasitism, exploitation, and perversity. It’s a drawn-out wait for unknown, troubling futures. And so, together, these artists bring a softness to the notion of endurance. They ask us to stay at the edge and a moment longer within the present and our bodies. What’s the rush after all? The afterlife might be a replica of this waiting room.