Dear Reader,

Cushy Number starts and ends with a letter. There is this letter that you are reading now, perhaps in advance of your visit or towards its end, and another letter that you will have already written as you watch Oliver Husain’s film installed in the main gallery.

In this film, you may recognize the definitive characteristics of Husain’s work. His props and staging are amalgams of borrowed tropes from cinema, pop, and queer culture. His visual cues are disarming yet also critical in his examination of their seductive power. His projections expand into staged environments to suggest that you, the viewer, are implicated in the narratives he creates.

Perhaps you were not expecting to be charmed by Husain’s film. This is not to suggest that Husain is a magician or a hypnotist (though he has been known to employ parlour tricks in the past.) Of course you have to watch the film in order for this to happen, and we must acknowledge the possibility that you might avert your eyes when you step into the gallery. You might, but we are betting you won’t.

In this film, Husain might be pondering the question, “How can one parse the collective experience of cinema into a relativistic, individual experience?” Film has the reputed ability to synthesize universal emotion while speaking to you, and only you, among the crowd. As the subject of a film stirs our innate emotions, do we not respond in turn? We are already implicated in a cinematic narrative by the act of watching cinema—seduced by a string of illuminated images—but more specifically here as the subject returns your stare through a semi-porous boundary that separates real space from screen space. As suggested in Husain’s film, could this narrative of desire in some way be akin to writing an unrequited love letter? No matter the source, as we read—or look, for that matter—we write.