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Why has the gothic returned? It has metastasized, a gothic grown on gothic. A more byperbolic version. Sometimes it's easier to embrace pain, ruin, than it is to desire change, which would leave possibility for disappointment. Instead welcoming the car crash to feel some control over its. We peek through doors at madness, horror, peel back scalps to see skull's white, as a comfort to state, surely the end-times will not be as bad as this.
The gothic's dissolution from historical marker to stylistic genre, like steampunk or retrofuturism, holds onto an anachronism, an implicit nostalgia for the past's future, rather than our own. What the Victorians had imagined as horror, pools of blood and pendulum cuts, is far more genteel than what is our current madness. This is the pleasure-saftey of genre, it has rules.
See too: Morag Keil at Project Native Informant, Morag Keil at Jenny’s, Morag Keil at Real Fine Arts, Nicolas Ceccaldi at Le Consortium