Fall Art: Twilight Zone

As if interpreting the old adage “out of darkness comes light,” this fall, three artists explore their shadow sides. In his exhibition “Library of Dust” (now a recently published book from Chronicle), photographer David Maisel takes a strangely transcendent tour of what was once the Oregon State Insane Asylum. “The air is dank and cool,” he says. “The room within is lined with simple pine shelves, stacked three deep with some 3,500 copper canisters.” Holding the cremated remains of psych patients who died at the hospital as far back at 1883, the urns no longer have any identifiable labels but have corroded with an unexpectedly brilliant array of color. Bringing these vessels out of internment, Maisel illuminates a forgotten past, creating a visually poignant monument to the unknown deceased.

“Rise and shine” is definitely not in the cards for the tragically sleep-deprived characters portrayed by Camille Rose Garcia in her show “Ambien Somnambulants,” at Chelsea’s Jonathan LeVine Gallery. The West Coast artist’s paintings and drawings pay homage, she says, to “sleepwalkers who wander along beautifully bleak apocalyptic dreamscapes.” Known for her socio-political narratives, Garcia uses Ambien, the popular sleeping pill, as a metaphor for what she sees as the sedated masses controlled by the pharmaceuticals industry. “The characters inhabit an ultra-bright surreal dream world resembling some of the more preposterous sleeping pill commercials—Lunesta comes to mind,” Garcia says. “I think these ultra-fake dreamlike images that keep cropping up in pop culture represent the chasm between what the world actually is and what we prefer it to be.”

Succubus Spring by Camille Rose Garcia.

Further exploring the gap between imagination and reality, photographer Alessandra Sanguinetti’s “The Life That Came” is a continuation of her earlier work, the poetic, intimate “The Adventures of Guille and Belinda and the Enigmatic Meaning of Their Dreams.” Since 1999, Sanguinetti has documented the lives of two young cousins growing up on their family’s farm outside Buenos Aires. Developing a close bond with the pair during her collaboration, Sanguinetti vividly captured their transition from youth to adulthood in often-folkloric pictures. The photographer’s latest haunting tableaux of buried fantasies and fears–one piece depicts the two girls submerged in the dirt with only their faces visible—will open at Yossi Milo Gallery in New York.

Offering up more luxurious possibilities of the night, Belgian artist Carsten Höller will create an operative, full-service hotel room in the Frank Lloyd Wright rotunda of the Guggenheim Museum. One of 10 artists invited to take part in theanyspacewhatever, a collection of site-specific installations, Höller’s “Revolving Hotel Room” will host a few lucky overnight guests, who must be warned in advance that wandering naked around the Guggenheim at all hours may constitute exhibitionism.

Carsten Höller’s “Revolving Hotel Room” at the Guggenheim Museum.