Ekphrasis is one of the oldest instruments in the Western toolkit: Homer stops the war for a hundred and thirty lines to describe a shield. The move is always presented as homage — the poet, humbled, straining to render in language what the eye already has. It is not homage. It is annexation. The image goes in and comes out as prose, which is to say it comes out sequential, argued, and in the possession of whoever is holding the pen. Something is taken in the crossing, and the tradition has spent three thousand years calling the theft a tribute.
This gallery runs the operation in reverse and watches the same border from the other side. A text goes in — a lyric, a line, a phrase that has been repeated until it stopped being looked at. A single image comes out. Nothing is illustrated: illustration keeps the text in charge and pins a picture underneath it like a caption in reverse. What is attempted here is a transfer with no supervising sentence, and then an honest account of what did not make it across.
The rule of the room. One source text. One image. No panel, no sequence, no arc — a sequence would let the picture do what prose does, which is argue in order, and the constraint of this gallery is that it must arrive all at once or not at all. The source is named on the wall label. The reading is not defended.
What counts as a finding. Not resemblance. An image that merely matches its text has told us only that the text was already visual. The finding is the residue: what the picture is forced to decide that the words left open, and what the words were carrying that no picture will hold. A song can say I want you to notice when I'm not around and leave the room unfurnished. A picture has to build the room, light it, and put the body somewhere in it — and in doing so it commits to a claim the lyric never made.