PRISKA C. JUSCHKA FINE ART
Berlin artist Wiebke Maria Wachmannuses the title "Ganze Tage Dazwischen" to describe one of her striking installations at Priska C. Juschka Fine Art. The word "dazwischen" refers to an in-between state of consciousness, neither dreaming nor wakefulness. Events in this state feel too eerie to be real, too familiar for a dream. It is the uncanny sensation felt upon entering a spotless white room, flooded with a perfect, colorless light. Within this visually silent enclosure, the absence of shadows makes interior dimensions difficult to gauge. In the stark whiteness, just as in pitch blackness, space seems to stretch on forever (a void that verges on the infinite) pure and empty except for, floating unaccountably in the center of the room, a single, perfect, white bed.
The familiar object, encountered in this in-between state, grows suddenly unsettling. It is too perfect, not a real bed nor even a rendering of a bed but rather an immaculate abstraction – a bed in a world of pure thought. The entire phantom space resembles a Platonic ideal, a bedroom (or an operating room, or perhaps a torture chamber) stripped down to its essence.
This room is one of Wachmann’s "Sublime Spaces". The objects in it – like the trees in her "Birch Forest" – occupy the borderland between existence and thought. Wachmann’s art dwells in contradictions: sculpture without mass, space without volume. Her spectral trees and floating beds are a narcotic for the eyes, drowsy apparitions to destabilize the senses. By moving from the subliminal to the sublime, Wachmann produces sensations too terrible to comprehend yet too seductive to resist.
-Craig Garrett
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Gallery hours: Tuesday through Saturday 11:00 to 6:00 PM or by appointment.
