Brigita Ozolins: LOOKS DREAMS AWAKES

LOOKS DREAMS AWAKES is based on a series of quotes by Carl Jung, the psychiatrist credited with founding analytic psychology. He gave us the terms introvert and extravert, synchronicity, archetype and the collective unconscious. Eight statements by Jung have been encrypted into binary code, but several significant words have been left in English, offering cryptic clues to Jung’s thinking.

The code and words are rendered from mirrored Perspex in a variety of colours and inlaid into white stained birch ply panels. As in previous exhibitions, such as Oracle 2020 and Unity 2016, the artificial is embedded into the natural, juxtaposing the inorganic with the organic, and nature with culture.

The words chosen from Jung’s writing for LOOKS DREAMS AWAKES reflect the complexity of the individual self. They advocate looking inward to understand the true nature of our identity, which Jung claims is accompanied by a shadow self, that part of ourselves that remains in darkness and we may find difficult to acknowledge.

How can I be substantial if I do not cast a shadow? 

In each of us is another whom we do not know.

Who looks outside dreams, who looks inside awakes.

The messages mirror the viewer and their surroundings in silver, gold, hot pink, red, blue, charcoal and orange. Through colour, they hint at their full content, promising meaning but at the same time denying full access to it. 

The exhibition also includes eight Perspex zeros suspended from the ceiling in a mobile-like formation. They gently rotate, accompanied by Bach’s Inventions and Sinfonias, some of Jung’s favourite music.

This is the second time Ozolins has used Jung’s words in a body of work. The first was in 2021, in the exhibition I must have a dark side, held at the New Norfolk Barracks which has a challenging history as a psychiatric hospital. In that show, Jung’s words were printed on fabric in black and white against a background of cloud formations and were suspended from the ceiling like washing hanging the line. LOOKS DREAMS AWAKES plays with binary code, colour and the reflective qualities of mirrored Perspex to engage viewers with a greater sense of mystery but a more positive outlook. It is through confronting the dark side of ourselves that awakening and lightness become possible.