Mandy Zhang Art is pleased to present Muscle Memory, a solo exhibition by Dylan Doe. Taking its cue from a small but telling “glitch” — a double-tap performed on a sketchpad page as though it were a touchscreen — the exhibition traces how digital behaviours migrate into the body, becoming reflex, habit, and involuntary choreography.

“As we shall see, the weird is that which does not belong. The weird brings to the familiar something which ordinarily lies beyond it.”
— Mark Fisher, The Weird and the Eerie

From this ghost gesture, Muscle Memory unfolds as a meditation on quiet trans-human integration: not the spectacle of implants or speculative prosthetics, but the subtle rewiring of attention through repetition. Doe’s paintings hover between fragmented portraiture and still life. Hands, hair, eyes, and lips — primary sites of sensation and contact — appear as anonymous components assembled into loose montages. These bodily fragments suggest presence without resolving into a whole, merging with imagined industrial apparatus that feels at once recognisable and faintly estranged within diorama-like settings.

Across the works, the hand becomes unstable as an emblem of craft and deliberate action. It is overtaken by the jittering finger, multiplied and re-tasked into compulsive, performative gestures — rapid swipes and partial touches that imply a drift into restless autopilot. The eye carries a quieter tension: often a single gaze looks past rather than back, withholding exchange and echoing mediated worlds where looking rarely implies encounter. Hair threads through scenes as if drawn from a machine, a veil-like trace between organic intimacy and engineered drift.

EXHIBITION DETAILS

Exhibition: Dylan Doe, Muscle Memory
Dates: 12 February – 27 March 2026
Private View: Thursday 12 February 2026, 6–8pm
Location: Mandy Zhang Art | 16 Seymour Place, London, W1H 7NG. Hours: Tue–Sat 11am–6pm