There is a moment in the swaying, sweltering chaos of the dance floor that seems to stop time. The music swells, enveloping you as the lights trace pathways through a hazy sky. It builds and pulses, seeping into your bones and ears, your very atoms, until the boundaries between bodies and space dissolve, and the individuals become bonded energy. At this instant, the DJ holds as certainly as the collective breath. Through InMotion, William Toney suspends the drop, freezing us in a moment whose textures are uncountable and ephemeral as the pixels that make up each digital print on the gallery walls, as distorted and captivating as the images sealed behind lenses that live within sound, as ineffable as a disrupted projection.

Sitting in the center of the margins, club culture offers an opportunity for both Black and queer communities to exist in unobserved communion. It is individualistic belonging, a freedom you can only find while being held. Sacred. Indescribable. An environment so suffused with sensation that to capture it is impossible, and to depict it is to violate the sanctity that has been gathered like a joyful balm for the bodies who move within. Using the modality of a Black gaze described by Tina Campt, which ‘rejects traditional understandings of spectatorship by refusing to allow its subject to be consumed by viewers,’ William Toney offers us an environment that is suffused by bodies whose presence is magnified by absence and anonymity. Via images, sculptures and sonic installation, we step into the space in their stead, into the stilled frame of a world that never stops moving. In it we can feel the peace that arrives amidst chaos, and consider the sanctity of a space that is meant to be felt in a world that seems so often to stare. The work allows us to exist both within and apart from the culture that is placed before us. To be of and other. To be in the beautiful otherwise. InMotion is a chance to step into and away. To shake off the constant policing inherent in being a mistrusted body and just be, for a moment, in a moment, of a moment. To feel the deep breath that fills our lungs and holds.