Amelia Gill, Wish Fulfilment

Harvard, Princeton, Amherst, Creighton, the University of Southern California, and Giovanni Bellini’s The Assassination of St Peter Martyr (ca. 1507) constitute the subject matter of Amelia Gill’s exhibition Wish Fulfilment, on view at Sutton Projects. Acceptance letters from these elite American universities have been sourced from anonymous posts on public forums, and Gill has reproduced them as oil paintings across five wooden panels. Some of the reproduced text adheres to the formal conventions of institutional correspondence, while others echo the increasingly gamified interfaces of online admissions portals—complete with digital confetti and animated fanfare.

Each of the admission letters is framed by its college’s signature colours—Princeton’s orange and black, Creighton’s white and blue. These bands of colour, once laser-printed, now rendered in oils, draw the eye before the text is even read. School colours are codified symbols of class and authority—precise hues that students internalise and project onto t-shirts, textbooks, sweatbands, and water bottles. The sixth work, positioned between the letters, is an enigmatic and meticulously executed copy of Bellini’s The Assassination of St Peter Martyr, painted at the same scale as the other panels. Its rich surface and subtle textures offer a visual counterpoint to the precise chromatic legibility of the admission letters.

Seen together, the signature colours and ornamental curls of confetti turn the academic invitations into miniature spectacles, amplifying the theatricality of achievement and social prestige they promise. In this sense, the exhibition pivots toward the experience encoded by the images: the tension of waiting, the thrill of recognition, and the pleasure in dreaming of success. Gill’s panels become sites where desire and aspiration are materially staged.

But what are we to make of Bellini’s scene? Gill’s faithful depiction represents the assassination of Saint Peter, a friar of the Dominican Order—members of which took vows of poverty and devoted themselves to preaching and evangelisation. For their piety they were killed by members of the Cathar sect, whose teachings Peter had condemned as heresy. In the distance, the peaks of mountain ranges are silhouetted against the light, while a herdsman drives cattle along a winding road into a fortified hillside town. This pastoral serenity is sharply contrasted with the violent action unfolding in the foreground. On a dirt track in the forest, Saint Peter and another Dominican friar are pursued and attacked by the Cathar assassins. Saint Peter, positioned at the bottom left, has collapsed to his knees, an axe lodged in his skull, while one of his killers, Carino of Balsamo, delivers the final blow to his chest with a dagger. Despite the brutality of the scene, Saint Peter faces toward the infinite summer sky, his expression calm, suggesting devotion, acceptance, and the peaceful ascent of his soul.

At first glance, Bellini’s devotional drama appears removed from the procedural language of college admissions. The Renaissance tableau of daggering and axe-murder offers visual depth, chiaroscuro, and emotional extremity, while the university letters—flat and formulaic—appear inert. Gill’s gambit is not stylistic continuity, but a temporal pivot: each painting captures the moment when potential hardens into outcome. For the saint, it is the instant in which faith meets mortal consequence; for the student, it is the instant in which aspiration meets achievement. Gill stages these images as different articulations of a single threshold—between anticipation and outcome, projection and event. Interestingly enough, Carino of Balsamo subsequently earned himself enough gold stars by confessing to his crime and becoming a Dominican lay brother that he too became venerated by the Catholic Church (albeit as a beatus). This lends an additional layer of theoretical speculation to Gill’s work. Good behaviour absolved and beatified Carino, whereas the same submission and devotion to the Ivy League sees students rewarded with their own admission and ascension.

Despite the precise task of copying each acceptance letter, traces of Gill’s hand persist: names smudged out, lines slightly bowing, the boundary between the blocks of colour is textured and soft. The tremor in a reproduced comma, or the imperceptible sway of a serif, amplified by the delicate texture of the oil paint, signals a level of attention that the original files, generated by automated digital systems, never required. The bureaucratic, neutral message becomes a site of unexpected tenderness. Indeed, the admission letters, while simpler in design, reveal more traces of the hand than the fastidious Bellini copy.

Gill’s imitation of the letters betrays their functional directness. Like Warhol’s Soup Cans, which ennoble commercial packaging, or Rauschenberg’s newspaper silkscreens, which freeze the hurried pace of print culture, Gill’s paintings draw attention to the emotional charge that emerges through close examination of the fleeting and mundane. Her letters belong to this tradition of objects not intended to last, granted the weight and longevity of oil paint, revealing the pathos embedded in their original form.

The exaggerated scale of the panels (each measuring 110 × 72 cm) and the embellishments of digital confetti feel less mocking than victorious. The traditional process of oil painting ensures that, despite the sparse arrangement, they can be taken entirely seriously when set alongside Bellini’s scene. Gill’s private network of aesthetic correspondences emerges in these subtle resonances, where an administrative gesture may echo something of the sacred. Reflecting on these works, one might consider how a fleeting moment of climax can embody a more general tension between what is anticipated and what ultimately occurs.

In “On Potentiality”, Giorgio Agamben considers the interface between what a thing can be and what it becomes—“the passage to actuality is the fulfilment of potentiality.” One might read Gill’s work as dwelling in this space, where desire and aspiration meet consequence: the student’s hope solidified through recognition, the saint’s devotion consummated through martyrdom. The material reproduction of each letter and of Bellini’s painting seems to enact this interface of victory, offering a sense of the instant in which potential becomes outcome. By presenting these two registers side by side, Gill invites reflection on this threshold that resonates across centuries and contexts. Potentiality here emerges not merely as a conceptual state but as an affective experience.

It is difficult to consolidate Wish Fulfilment—these delicate apparatuses, through which I have attempted to trace the temporal rhythms of the exhibition, resist enclosure. CONGRATULATIONS remains frozen across each admission letter, as does Saint Peter’s serene gaze. Perhaps, just as the centuries that have passed have ripened the reverent spirit of Bellini’s hand, so too might the future return to the artifacts of modern times, like admission letters, and perceive a dramatic culmination of a life spent in aspiration and faith.