“And her hallway moves like the ocean…down the river there's a ship that will carry the Dream of the flood.” And THIS IS NOT A DREAM…
So, what do we focus on? The meaning? The process, the medium? The experience! Hey, it’s not that serious…jump right in, the water’s just fine!
Sometimes it feels like being trapped beneath a wave, like being ragdolled: you cannot fight it, or you only make it worse. Time distorts and stretches as the wave churns and catapults your forcibly limp body into a million different directions. You just have to hold on for dear life. Thirty seconds feels like an eternity. A violent waiting room. You have to surrender, let the wave spend itself, and hope you emerge amidst the foam rather than against the coral. This is not a metaphor but a lived temporality.
In dream life, waking life, digital life: time dilates. The body loses orientation. The wave cannot be strong-armed into ending by sheer force of will. Waking life can be just as soft, violent, entropic, and psychedelic as its dream-life mirror. The unconscious is not always a sanctuary. It is a universal field of fragments, of ideas, where brutality and desire are metabolized. We could be trapped underwater, or frozen, or visiting a world made of light. Who are those little creatures? Why is there scaffolding? Do I have a quest? Am I part of the northern lights now? We generally function according to a set of inherited structures, assembled over centuries, regarding language, behavior, perception, and “truth.” These are strategies against (perceived) chaos, a scaffolding to manage and metabolize waking reality. In this, we are caught in constant loops of mourning the loss of the divine or the erosion of the sacred while clinging to symbolic systems unraveling around us.
As a result, the collective and all its thoughts and dreams (and what we can glean from it) are totally mangled. We are renegotiating where meaning lives every day, in our own lives, in the lives of others, in our dreams, their dreams…we are swimming in symbolic overflow. Every system, including the symbolic order, carries the seeds of its own undoing. The subconscious and the unconscious capture everything we see and everything we don’t. They are alchemical condensations of our deepest fears, of all of the things we have touched, of stray details: what you saw at work that day, or what it feels like to talk to your mother, or what it feels like to be caught in a riptide. A dream is a synthesis that resists the logic of waking life, and yet, it is inextricable from it. So when we enter a dream world, and, perhaps on occasion, a set of archetypes, especially that of another, we may have an uncanny feeling of returning home. It is somewhere eternally present and totally timeless. It is frightening and confusing and a mirror of modern life’s severity, refracted through softness.A braid is never just a braid. Or is it? An image can be conjured of, for instance, three friends cutting hair at a sleepover. Beeswax candles melting in the dark. A fragment of intimacy. A memory of tenderness. Giggling. Just mucking about, really. And then we cut it off, we wake up, and the braid becomes an artifact, and the waxy residue eventually becomes a fossil. From that moment on, a shorn braid becomes a little death. It is an offering. This is the stuff of dreams. * You're having a drink and performing proximity to the aura of meaning.
Yet the “fury to unveil the [naked] truth” (Baudrillard) is directly proportionate to the impossibility of ever reaching it. The more fiercely we chase meaning, the more it eludes us. “Everything eludes itself.” We inhabit this world that has reached a critical acceleration point where a sign no longer behaves like a sign, where the symbolic universe is unreliable and distorted, and digital life disfigures and reassambles meaning and logic beyond previous recognition. Meaning is extracted and repackaged as clarity, or worse, as truth. And we often play to what the system rewards. We glance in the corner of our eye, a soft shadow whips past, or a cloud, or a flash of green, or a little sleep demon. At this peripheral site, we find a sort of familiarity. We return to a time outside of time that is inexact and amorphous. Peripheral vision is as close as we can get to dreaming open-eyed. Something felt rather than known.
We now live in a world that demands clarity. Modernity—digital life, platform logic, surveillance culture— rewards neat justifications, clear identities, and singular meanings.
This is the ecology of Robertson’s work. An ecology of memory: something swimmy, entropic, tender, and feminine. Not feminine as a style, but as a methodology: nonlinear, peripheral, resistant to mastery, and elusive of capture. Feminine matter infiltrating and liquefying the structures of symbolic order. This work asks us to look sideways, to linger in the haze, to sit with images that do not immediately disclose their “truth.”
What if we just wanted to play for a little while? What if the meaning you felt was already there and also never existed, and maybe, it’s just not for you to know now, is it? Sit with that feeling. Something felt rather than known. Get ragdolled.
This is not a conclusive interpretation. To write about art is often to pretend at some sort of clarity. So let us enact the same logic as the work we are attending to: recursive, looping, and entropic. It is a meditation on feeling thrashed in the undertow of meaning.
This is an offering.