“Speed is no longer a means but a destiny.” — Paul Virilio
dépendance is pleased to present E=mcScared, Alexandra Metcalf’s first solo exhibition at the gallery. The exhibition takes up speed not as a thrill or a sign of progress, but as something stranger and more wearing: a pressure that gets into the body, bends attention, and makes time feel both compressed and unstable. Moving between the railway age and the always-on logic of the present, Metcalf looks at what happens when acceleration stops being an event and becomes an atmosphere.
The railway sits in the show as both historical reference and formal armature. In the nineteenth century, the train was one of modernity’s great promises, but it also brought new forms of strain. Metcalf returns to the old diagnosis of “railway madness,” a term used to describe dizziness, agitation, fainting, and nervous disturbance in passengers exposed to unprecedented speed. The phrase now sounds theatrical, but the symptoms remain familiar enough. It described a body struggling to keep pace with a world that had suddenly started moving faster than it knew how to read. Distances collapsed, landscapes blurred, and perception lost its footing. That history feels less distant than it should. Digital life has made speed intimate, demanding us to answer, think, work, and recover faster, while appearing composed. Burnout and anxiety reflect a system treating exhaustion as collateral for efficiency.
Metcalf points to forms of labour that do not fit cleanly into the forward march of industrial productivity: care, maintenance, repetition, domestic work, the daily work of keeping things going. These rhythms are cyclical, often invisible, and historically feminised. They do not speed up neatly, though systems keep trying to make them do so. The result is friction, and sometimes collapse.
A series of paintings stage these ideas through scenes of passengers in train compartments set against ebru, the marbling technique in which pigment is floated on water before being transferred to fabric. The process sets fluidity and ornament against the harder logic of transit and enclosure. Elsewhere a fainting woman appears multiplied, fragmented, and slightly machinic. With repeated limbs and interrupted gestures, she seems less like a heroine in distress than a body stuck in a loop. The faint becomes less an ending than a system error. A spinning operating light extends this mood. Rather than illuminating anything clearly, it throws vision off balance, scattering motifs of stars, trees, and brain-like forms into a restless circuit. Part theatre, part clinic, part planetarium, it makes seeing feel unsteady.
E=mcScared follows the line from movement to sensation to symptom. Train, light, and body become linked instruments in a larger drama of overstimulation. What emerges is not a refusal of modern life, but a more exacting sense of what speed extracts, and of the psychic and bodily residues it leaves in its wake.
Alexandra Metcalf (1992, UK) lives and works in Berlin, Germany. She graduated from the Chelsea College of Art and Design, London and Rhode Island School of Design, Providence. Her work has recently been exhibited at Sadie Coles, London; The Perimeter, London; Kunsthalle Zürich; FRAC Corsica, Corte; Capitain Petzel, Berlin; Champ Lacombe, Biarritz; 15 Orient Gallery, New York and Ginny on Frederick, London.