A friend once challenged me to go to the beach, watch the sunset, and try to truly feel that I was the one spinning, watching the sun dip beyond the horizon’s limit. I have spent a lot of time thinking about the difference between fact and feelings, and how one can hold two very different things in the mind and the heart at the same time. Focusing on sensations that one knows but rarely feels exercises one’s ability to shift perspectives, opening a contextual space in which messy, multiple versions of reality and all its substance (facts and feelings, histories, futures, and fantasies) can surface.
Erica Wessmann’s work attempts to create openings where we can temporarily suspend our notion of stability and meaningfully alter the way we understand our own perspective and subjective experience. Often, bringing a variety of different research material together into one space with physically constructed elements containing complicated and coded materials, Wessmann attempts to shift the viewer’s perspective materially, drawing out complex embedded histories within sculptural objects. In the past few years some of these themes have included: space travel and the aesthetic of space race; changing perceptions of the future; cultural bias and its relationship to images proliferating the media; written descriptions of interiority; how time is perceived within the site of criminal investigations; and that which cannot be explained yet is wholly felt. More recently Wessmann’s installations have evolved to incorporate an emphasis on physical engagement, attempting to speak to subjective and inherited fantasy, and perpetuate a mode of personal discovery.