Portal, 2025
Materials: charcoal on canvas
Dimensions: 120cm x 90cm
Photo credit: Dan Weill
The prospect of a portal came about during a conversation with Steve while working on our VR commission. We envisioned it as a speculative space—an attempt to forge a link to something yet unknown. Inside its central aperture, I placed a Borromean knot (or rather, a not-knot, as its three interlinked rings form a structure rather than a true knot) as a nod to Jacques Lacan, who used these rings to map the registers that hold human reality together: the Imaginary (images), the Symbolic (language), and the Real (the unrepresentable or resisted). In this regard, the portal operates as an unstable threshold of ‘Place’—a space resisting immediate language or spatial definition, where an individual’s sense of reality and belonging begins to unravel.
After 3D-scanning the portal and knot, we placed them inside our VR environment, We Are Only Partly Real, where they sit in conversation with Spaghettification. For this neighboring installation, I drew on the concept of a tulpa—a term to describe a being or object that is created through a person’s mental or spiritual powers, which I first encountered in David Lynch’s Twin Peaks: The Return. Named after the violent gravitational distortion near a black hole, Spaghettification transforms during the VR exhibition’s ‘night cycle’. As the objects within it begin to glow and flicker, they summon three film references woven together through color symbolism, alternate realities, and time as a physical dimension.