You can watch a video of this review on YouTube

My primary goal upon resigning from my teaching job was prioritizing sleep. For 10 months out of every year, for the last 10 years, my iPhone played a chipper birdsong that eventually became ominous. When it sounded, I had to – digit by digit and limb by limb – peel myself from the soft clouds of sweet dreams and set foot on the cold reality of responsibility. There were lessons to teach, conferences to prepare for, after school meetings to run. No matter what time it sounded, and no matter how much sleep I’d gotten the night before, the distant birdsong always seemed to call from the ever-hazy other side of consciousness. Just over the hedges of my own personal Eden – or, as Wangari Mathenge would describe: just beyond a bedimmed boundary. 

Wangari Mathenge’s fall 2024 exhibition, entitled Bedimmed Boundaries: Between Wakefulness and Sleep at Nicola Vassell in Chelsea feels like – and is – its own version of a dreamscape. Most of the paintings are just barely larger than life, which serves to upset your sense of scale and emphasizes details that would otherwise draw little notice. A foot, peeking out from the blanket, has blue toenails. A sock, emerging from a striped onesie pajama set, looks like it was knitted with paint. The blankets, lush and bundled, look ready to crawl into. Cozy. Each stroke of the brush is intentional in color and texture and the works, though painted, hang like quilts.

Clocks appear as a motif and implying the endless passage of time. What if we could stay in bed forever? What if the adventures I conjure in my dreams could count for something on the concrete side of consciousness? 

I got the feeling the artist had anticipated my question when I stepped into a dark room in the center of the gallery. A short film, also by Mathenge, flickered through an animation of sleeping, waking, walking to one’s destination, and waking again to the sounds of roosters. Played on loop, it becomes difficult to tell when the character is truly awake. Wangari, who is a graduate of Howard and Georgetown, worked in finance and law for years before she committed herself to her dream of being an artist. I can relate to her journey of pursuing the realistic only to end up choosing the fantastic. Standing in the gallery admiring her work, I’m part of her life-dream come true.  

To that end, maybe our whole lives are just dreams within dreams. When the boundaries are fuzzy like a new pair of house shoes, we shuffle along in the wee hours, thinking of waking and dreaming of rest.

Wangari Mathenge’s “Bedimmed Boundaries: Between Wakefulness and Sleep” is open at Nicola Vassell Gallery from September 5th to October 19th, 2024. 

I hope you enjoyed this gallery tour. To see more black art vlogs, broadway theater reviews and museum tours, please subscribe to my channel: Black Star Reviews. 

Black Love and Starlight, stay shining y’all.