Notes on Wangari Mathenge: Bedimmed Boundaries: Between Wakefulness and Sleep

“...and through that relation of desire or love the other comes to exist for me as a thing or being.” (Salamon 2010, 46). Images of individuals sleeping always inspire inquiry into voyeurism and the voyeuristic tendency inherent to the spectator sport of viewing, analyzing, and critiquing artwork. However, the work of Wangari Mathenge eludes a plain ascription of “voyeur” to her artworks’ viewers; instead, each work appears to offer the opportunity for a reconstitution of an incomplete beingness. The figures depicted reside in a liminal position—between wakefulness and sleep; between ‘I am…’ and absolute silence. In these moments of absolute silence, that moment of unconscious existence, the only potential for beingness to be articulated is via relation. Only the viewer can complete the attempt ‘to be.’ The desire to be seen is met with the desire to see.

In the exhibition, Mathenge offers a stunning animation that offers a transport “between wakefulness and sleep:” a site of explosive disorientation bordering on a euphoric psychosis. Memories and dreams coalesce to become inescapable and inarticulable realities. This animation is en route to the final room which holds my favorite piece: If You Complete a Dream … (Bedimmed Boundaries) (slide 3). The holding gaze is paralyzing and yet the figure’s stillness feels imposed, as if she herself is paralyzed by my own gaze. I can barely hear it, but I can clearly hear the sounds of the animation in this separate room; it feels as if her eyes opening return us both back to Being—being-for one another.

Wangari Mathenge: Bedimmed Boundaries: Between Wakefulness and Sleep at Nicola Vassell
(5 September - 19 October 2024)

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