A soft spot designates a liking, a peculiar weakness. A delicate, practically wistful affinity, it’s a form of love that is neither fierce nor tragic, yet nonetheless possesses a certain vulnerability—an openness. A soft spot is a noun, perhaps it’s even a space, a tender fondness for someone, something, or somewhere that you could locate within your body. We tend to have soft spots for things that are no longer there, for things we remember, and we hold this space open for their return.

Objects keep their secrets, spaces too. Emily Wardill’s fourth exhibition with carlier | gebauer, entitled Soft Spot, gestures toward such secrets with the works I gave my love a cherry that had no stone (2016) and Night For Day (2020). In their portrayals of imagined realities, perhaps these films have a soft spot for each other, holding open space for the past to imagine the future—and vice versa.