Like Chanarin's previous projects, A Perfect Sentence crisscrosses the line between discipline and chance: organised collaborative photoshoots with institutional partners give way to chance encounters with strangers and friends, missteps and wilful attempts at getting lost in the world, chaos in the darkroom, and self-critical texts. Chanarin refuses the authority of a final image, often choosing to present in-progress darkroom prints that show the processes of correction, redaction and selection, the images refusing to resolve themselves. The Sisyphean and futile task of distilling a country onto the page becomes grist for the mill as Chanarin's candid images — sometimes uncomfortable and disquieting, elsewhere bucolically British — accrue and coagulate, like thick piled slabs of buttered toast.
Commissioned and produced by Forma in collaboration with eight UK organisations, A Perfect Sentence culminates in a series of regional exhibitions, in which the series is presented in different iterations: from framed works continuously mounted and unmounted from the gallery walls by a robotic arm trained to respond to patterns of audience attention, to a suite of screenprints, to outdoor poster exhibitions.
