Solo Exhibition
5 April - 22 April 2025

Exhibition Opening: Saturday 5 April 2025
Exhibition Closure: Tuesday 22 April 2025 Share Facebook Twitter

WHATIFTHEWORLD is pleased to present Mirage Blue, a collaborative video installation by Wendy Fredriksson and Rowan Smith. The titular film was written and directed by Fredriksson, which incorporates and riffs off artworks from Smith’s 2023/2024 WHATIFTHEWORLD exhibition ‘A Deixis in Folds’. In addition, Smith scores the work under the guise of Memoriez.

Featuring Yun Lee and Nazeer Jappie, Mirage Blue centres on two individuals engaged in a curious boardgame. They exist in the kind of liminal space that brings to mind the Red Room from David Lynch and Mark Frost’s Twin Peaks, substituting the iconic red velvet drapes for the timeless infinity of blue walls, but retaining the sculptural décor through the inclusion of Smith’s sculptures.

The board resembles an MC Escher take on Snakes and Ladders, as the two participants take turns rolling a die and moving their pieces along the intertwined blue symbols. The end goal is ambiguous, and whether the game has a victor is not apparent. What is clear is that the game is not without stakes, a palpable tension hangs over the table as the players await the consequences of their opponent’s next move.

While Fredriksson has intentionally kept the reading of the film open-ended, in a broad sense it seems to speak to the complexity of unfurling intimate relationships and the tensions between what is revealed and concealed during the process of attempting to excavate the other.  Taking Smith’s sculptural cloth into account, René Magritte’s The Lovers I and II come to mind. Here the titular lovers are presented in typical cinematic love scene poses, but are disrupted by the suffocating cloth which conceals their faces, suggesting perhaps that the performativity of intimacy can hinder any real expression of it. This does seem to be a space navigated by the film’s protagonists.

A popular phrase that has emerged in political commentary is the idea of ‘playing 4d chess’, usually in reference to someone seemingly adept at anticipating their opponents’ next succession of moves. Mirage Blue seems to point to a kind of 5D chess, one that not only plays out omnidirectionally in time space, but collapses a multiverse of temporalities into a single palimpsest. Each player brings with them a lifetime of experiences and memories which hybridize and fuse in the unfolding present.

Gilles Deleuze’s concept of the Fold offers a practical way of framing this, and certainly seems in step with the included works by Smith such as Oblique Flow Chart of Permanence. Deleuze’s idea of The Fold is a metaphysical one, which is to say that it is concerned with exploring the fundamental nature of reality, existence, and the universe. Rather than imagining time and existence as a flat, uniform cloth, Deleuze proposes that they are dynamically shaped by a series of folds—each representing moments or events that are not isolated but interconnected. These folds reveal that what we perceive as distinct dichotomies (like the inside and outside, or mind and body) are not fundamentally separate but are continuously interwoven. In this process, the apparent boundaries dissolve, giving way to a reality that is perpetually unfolding and reconfiguring itself in a multiplicity of ways.

In The Fold: Leibniz and the Baroque, Deleuze proposes a new conception of the Baroque along these lines. Simplifying in the extreme, the appeal of the Baroque in this sense is the movement’s embracing of the messiness of lived experience, dynamism, tactility, and energy over stolid academism. The symbolic realms of Mirage Blue exhibit a number of Baroque sensibilities.

We begin in a tidy, liminal non-space which is increasingly disrupted and populated by elements of the various realms as the two participants’ game progresses. There seems to be a continuous temporal folding between realms, a permeable membrane through which leakages occur cluttering the sleek glass surface of the table.

The first realm introduces the haptic visuality of water and cloth stuck to skin, imagery which could be experienced sensually or with tactile defensive horror. Following the exchange, Nazeer Jappie’s character is shown to have soaked hands back in the original game’s realm. The reciprocal realm of melted wax and candlelight chiaroscuro similarly seeps back onto Yun Lee in the game space. What we could call the dinner scene channels the palpable allegory of Baroque still lifes—but with a fluid, subjective interpretation rather than a fixed series of memento mori signifiers.

To return to Magritte’s layering of time and notions of reality and illusion, the film’s visually-striking final sequence and Rowan Smith’s sculpture Fade to Blue or Disappear, There both display a kind of temporal folding that is evident in Magritte’s 1964 painting Le pays des miracles (The Country of Marvels).

Smith’s work speaks to the discovery that ancient Greek and Roman sculptures were in fact often brightly painted rather than the canonized expectation which falsely valorises pristine whiteness. Although the paint layers have been lost to the ages either through weathering or over-zealous cleaning, microscopic flecks remain, which can be seen through the use of infrared light. One of the most commonly recurring colours is that of Egyptian blue, a popular pigment of its time. By fading his sculpture to blue, Smith folds time and allows the work to simultaneously reference the original polychromatic state of these classical sculptures and their contemporary misconception.

Fredriksson’s protagonists fold time through their game, either successfully peeling away the layers of obstruction which hindered authentic connection – piercing the veil of Magritte’s Lovers II – or upon removal of the layers of intrigue, discovering an empty all-consuming void; the mirage blue.

Text by Tim Leibbrandt