Marion Saarik “Dreamflesh”

The exhibition centers around a dreamlike journey. Moving through rooms and corridors of the subconsciousness where the body and mind wander, dance, roam. In a place where layers recur, spatiality and spacelessness alternate. It is a rove that never stays on one surface but slides onto the next layer, new room, new body.

“Dreamflesh” signifies something ambivalent – a body that belongs to the dream and a dream that takes ahold of the body. It can be a delicate shell that opens up or a thick coat of shadow that shrouds your soul. It may be the spirit of desires and fears that incarnates for a second, only to fade away again.

As the words from Anaïs Nin’s novella “House of Incest” : “The day and night unglued, and I falling in between not knowing on which layer I was resting, whether it was the cold grey upper leaf of dawn, or the dark layer of night.” It’s that in-between where the exhibition places itself. In a place where dream and wakefulness, body and mind, spatiality and spacelessness interweave and dreamflesh is born.

The room radiates red light, as if in a dream, that stratifies and fades showing something and hiding the other. It is a moment when the vision reveals itself and we can sense its presence. Peeking into a room where the body and mind are present and absent at the same time, layers begin to open up, light and shadow intertwine and time seems to be moving at its own rhythm.

Marion Saarik (born 2000) is a painter based in Pärnu who obtained a bachelor’s degree from the Estonian Art Academy’s painting department. Her work explores the space between body and mind, where perception and dreamlike experiences intertwine and identity dissolves. The artist explores movement through layers and shadows, where presence and absence, visible and invisible alternate, creating intimate and enigmatic intermediate states. Saarik’s painting process is simultaneously a self-discovery and observation, where each work brings to light unconscious truths and reveals inner sensitivity and vulnerability. Her work invites the viewer to think, observe and experience intermediate states that remain unarticulated but deeply affect the perceived reality and inner world.

Graphic design by Markus Laanisto

The exhibition is supported by Cultural Endowment of Estonia

Special thanks to Annabel Juhkental, Aleksandra Sofia Helena Nyyssönen, Alar Saarik and Margit Saarik